Persistence of Visions (Lessons in Living From The Classroom and Elsewhere)

The Persistence of Visions
(Reflections on living from the classroom

and elsewhere)
by
Nelson R. “Buzz” Kellogg

2
Persistence of Visions
(Reflections on living from the classroom
and elsewhere)
© 1999
Nelson R. Kellogg
all rights reserved

Do not copy or distribute without author’s permission
3
The Persistence of Visions

(Reflections on living from the classroom and elsewhere)
Table of Contents
Preface 6
Introduction Upward not Northward; Out of FlatlandAltogether 9
Part One On Gratitude 19
Chapter 1: Childhood and the Intimations of Gratitude 19
Chapter 2: Why Have We Forgotten Gratitude 33
Chapter 3: Beyond Childhood: cultivating an even deeper gratitude 49
Part Two Understanding Surrogates 68
Chapter 4: The Power of Surrogates 68
section i) Money Changes 68
section ii) The Invisible Hand meets the Pastoral Ideal 104
section iii) And Your Point Is? 77
Chapter 5: A World of Acceleration (or, why jump from a window?) 89
section i) A brief excursion by way of physics 90
section ii) Another brief excursion in accelerating

acceleration: global free-market capitalism 99
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Chapter 5, continued
section iii) Uncle Hilding: my first introduction
to market capitalism 106
section iv) Why do people jump out of windows? 112
Chapter 6: The Great Divergence 133
section i) When skating on thin ice, just skate faster 135
section ii) Pay no attention to the man behind the screen 144
section iii) Can we ever go home again? 155
Part Three Deep Practice, Synthesis, and Envisioning
(Thoughts on conversation, community, education,
and what is worth doing) 159
Chapter 7: When Questions Come of Age 159
section i) A river runs through it (the stages of life) 159
section ii) When are we available for wisdom? 166
section iii) Keeping track of your life
and telling stories 176
section iv) A note on mortality 185

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Chapter 8: Holography, Deep Practice, and Synthesis:
Thoughts on education 188
section i) Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom 188
section ii) On holography:
A possible framework for envisioning 194
section iii) The romance of insight and the grand adventure
of being human 206
section iv) Why should we seek wisdom? 220
section v) What ARE we doing?
The evolution of the university
and the atrophy of synthesis 226
section vi) The future of education,
formal and informal 239
section vii) The Conversational Community:
Reading out from the university 261
Chapter Notes 273

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Preface — On Reading this Book
Over the years I have lost what used to be my writer’s voice. Actually, my
speaking voice and my writer’s voice have essentially become one and the same.
I write the way I speak and vice versa, and this is most evidently the case when I
am writing about something for which I deeply care. Invariably when I give a
manuscript to a friend to read, one of their first responses back to me is, “well, I
can certainly hear your voice in it. Your presence is right there in it.” With this
in mind, let me make a brief explanation of how this book is put together, and
how it may help to read it.
I believe in the power of stories. I believe that a story, told from the
compassionate heart of experience and listened to with the understanding heart,
can have deeper effect, deeper meaning, and ultimately even be more true, than
the actual contents of its plot. Stories come in all varieties, and have been used
throughout time and across cultures to convey the best wisdoms the teller has to
offer. In contemporary society we tend to devalue stories if we seek advice or
knowledge. We want the facts, and those analyzed. If we think we are being led
out of our constructs of reason and facts by someone, we might dismiss what
they have to say with the words, “Oh, that’s just a story!”
I think we are on very slippery territory if we do not embrace the power of
story if we truly seek wisdom. If we seek visions, stories are indispensable.
Although I am not engaged in a work of fiction with this book, I still see what I
do as essentially telling stories. I recently read a wonderful little essay by a
storyteller, and I’d like to quote from her here because her words are a wonderful
example of the telling heart.
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The direct involvement in becoming the story makes it an experience, one that
occurs at the moment of the telling. A story is not an explanation. It is lived
between teller and listener; it resonates far beyond the content. The text alone,
separated from the enlivening experience, can be analyzed, but the result is different.
It is not a transformative event. In other words, genuine story manifests when it is
heard in the moment, when the listener is drawn out of self-consciousness--the
thinking mind held entranced by the ongoing logic of the narrative--and becomes
everything in the story. The meaning and the power of the story do not reside in
the content alone; rather they unfold in the dynamic processes of listening/creating.
The storytelling is potent because it is physical experience. The whole person is
engaged in the making of meaning and story. Mind, body, and heart are
synchronized and activated. The embodied listener is alert, with senses heightened,
and naturally creates image and meaning from association, feeling, memory, dream,
and a ceaseless source of archetypal symbols within. It is this holistic activity of
listening, not the conceptual content of the text or plot alone, where true learning
takes place. During the event, the inherent and natural wisdom of ear, eye, and
heart are given voice. (from “Through the Story’s Terror,” by Laura Simms,
Parabola, volume 23, no. 3, 1998, pp. 46, 47)
The topics discussed in this book are at the core of my being. I care
intensely about them, and these thoughts animate my life. In the telling of each
section and chapter, I am quite literally speaking. I cannot say whether or not
they will resonate for every reader, for different listeners respond to different
tellers. Still, as I speak out what is in my heart and mind, I am also paying
attention to the alertness, engagement, possible points of confusion, and even
body language of an imaginary audience. That audience picture comes from
somewhere, probably including from a lot of interwoven memories of actual
audiences, but perhaps from other sources as well. As I let myself become a
storyteller, it is the implicit dialogue that tells me if the deeper truths are
resonating. Taking on this role, when I pay attention to the process, also tells
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me when enough is enough, when bridges need to be presented, and simply

when to lighten up.
It is with this awareness and sensibility that I try to write, and informs the
overall structure of this book. Each chapter I see as a narrative, even when
interspersed with digressions that may not appear of themselves to be very
story like. I try to say what I need to say, and hope that each section has
something of a narrative arc to it, or, in musical terms, a theme, a development,
and a resolution, occuring within an experiential arc. For this reason, I have left
out of the main text a lot of detail, quotes, data, sources, and even some telling
vignettes. It would be well and good to leave them out if the stories were for
imaginal purposes only, but these reflections are meant to connect to what our
lives are often about, and what we may wish to attend to instead.
In order to do justice to any telling of the patterns of our lives, therefore, I
owe it to the reader to provide grounding for these ruminations. The functions
of the extensive “Notes” section at the end of this book, is much more than a
bibliography. The “Notes” do contain bibliographic sources, organized according
to themes raised in the text. There are also a host of other examples, further
digressions, and anecdotes with which I wrestled at times, considering that they
should be part of the primary text. However, as I read through these ideas, I
tried to keep the chapters in the story-telling voice. Anything that went beyond
what seemed to constitute a good telling, within an experiential arc of active
listening, I left off and pursued in the “Chapter Notes.”
My suggestion, therefore, would be to read the book in its large “Parts,” or
at least in chapters, and then to read the associated notes sections, not so much
for data-buttressing, but rather as a companion text. This is only a suggestion.
Of course you will decide how you wish to approach the writing. More
importantly, you will decide if the writing is worthy, and if the telling compels.
I am most grateful to share some thoughts with you.
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Introduction — Upward Not Northward;

Out of Flatland Altogether
We must always follow somebody looking for truth,

and we must always run away from anyone who finds it.
Andre Gide
It is so difficult to find the beginning.

Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning.
And not try to go further back.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
This book is about promptings, questions, desires, and resolutions. It is

about things that have happened while I was busy teaching, among other
pursuits, but primarily while teaching. This book comes from paying attention to
what feels authentic and what feels like a distraction. It comes from living with
an extremely low tolerance for putting aside spiritual and intellectual
dissonance, while just getting on with things, although there have been many
times when I wished I could do just that. It comes from cycles of loneliness
when it seemed I could not find a way to express to others the drive to
understand what lay beneath the practical and below the technique of whatever
we spend our time and energy doing in our everyday lives. My passion was for
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the more fundamental human reality that was essential to improve our
understanding of why we do what we do and that, once openly discussed, could
go very far in clarifying what we are about in any life endeavor. Such
considerations might either make improvements in the techniques used to solve
problems attendant to our current pursuits much more straightforward, or, on
the other hand, would cause us to radically reconsider whether our actions were
worthy pursuits at all. Doubtless, such a description of loneliness in the search
for more fundamental meaning will strike some as a common phase in individual
development. Still, it seems important to me to report that I, as well,
experienced these anxieties acutely, and they are an indispensable part of my
journey.
For me, this search led to a career in teaching after experimenting in several
other careers. To the limits of my understanding, it seemed that being about the
work of teaching, all the while pursuing more soul–satisfying answers to the
purpose of life and effort, would never leave me afterward in a spiritual funk
thinking I had been wasting time, or not doing the best with the insights I had
at any given juncture. Further, I now have a much broader conception of the
qualities I found through teaching and see these qualities expressed in many
other professions, locations, and modes besides those of the formal classroom. So
I offer these reflections only by way of what I observed as I followed a chosen
path.
This book springs from those wonderful moments of transcendent
synthesis when my ruminations were validated while among others who found
such pivotal, shared questions to be an invitation to envision what they might
wish to do with their lives, rather than as a fearful experience. I have often heard
formal education referred to as the artificial antecedent to “real life” or the “real
world.” I find the converse to have been true. Where else could one find the
privileged dispensation to ask students of all ages and experiences just what
they consider to be the meaning of life, of their lives? What constitutes a life
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well lived, and how does one apply oneself to answering that question and then
allow oneself to be directed by those answers? What could be more important in
the process of learning anything, or pursuing any occupation, than to face such
questions directly? And yet fear is a common and understandable response
because such questions beg us to examine the status quo, wondering with
apprehension just what we are spending most of our mortality doing. Without
the proper environment foregrounding the hope that arises from envisioning
what might be rather than the loss of what is, and that conceives of a significant
meaningful emergence resulting from this hard work, the serious consideration
of meaningful living appears to risk a spiritual free–fall with nothing else to
grab on to.
And finally, this book finds its voice in conversation, and the conversations I
can most readily locate are from the classroom. If there are true insights into
these crucial questions, they find themselves in the art of conversation most
broadly conceived: conversation in the presence of others within a community of
trust; conversations with the insights of authors, artists, philosophers of the
physical and metaphysical, and acquaintances; and with these dialogues to draw
upon, our conversations with ourselves and the sublime.
The essays in this book are not an attempt to retrieve the actual content of
particular courses I have taught although some of that retrieval is
indistinguishable from the deep experiences themselves. Instead, these essays
proceed from powerful recognitions of turning points when teaching students
ages 16 to 60. I have found that the sticking points for those students were the
same fundamental questions that I was feeling my way toward. Expressing these
ideas directly, in the true spirit of inquiry, and not with a hidden dogma I am
waiting for them to guess, but with evident hope and some suggestions I have
found compelling, is an invitation that has completely changed the atmospherics
of learning and sometimes seemed to be emblematic of truly life–changing
experience itself.
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Not every area of reflection found here was always explored in every class I
have taught. With high school students, it was often sufficient that the pupils
sensed that there was someone with them, a generation or so older, who seemed
to them reflective enough to have encountered questions of existence and to
have come away with an abiding sense that life is exciting and profoundly worth
living, all the while exploring some more bounded intellectual “deep practice”
with them, which in my case was physics and mathematics. In these settings, the
questions addressed in this book were often introduced implicitly, sometimes
obliquely or inferentially, but I think that their presence as subtext was
significant nonetheless. I will explore the concept and implications of deep
practice in Chapter 8.
At the college level, especially in the liberal studies program where I now
teach, these questions have often been raised more explicitly, even with first-year
students (age 18) and certainly with older students. In these settings, it often
appeared to be critical for students that these questions were addressed. The
willingness of the class to move to these most fundamental levels and have
something real to consider made all the difference between students
experiencing despair, along with its self–protective twin, apathy, and taking
flight with their ideas and lives.
I don’t know when it came into vogue in the academy, but we still seem to be
living with the perception that for students to be liberally educated, they have to
be, first of all, shocked into a wider perception of the world. After all, most of
these college kids (so the stereotyping model goes) simply have to become aware
of how little they know. This awareness is best accomplished by giving them
example after example of just how tragic the course of human history is,
including the lives of most people worth knowing about. A perpetually furrowed
brow and dark desperation are the only true signatures that a student really
“gets it” and is finally awakened to life as it is. (For a most polished evocation of
this temperament, see "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: as lite
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entertainment for bored college students," by Mark Edmundson, Harper’s

Magazine, September, 1997.)
At the same time, the most obvious sign that a student absolutely does not
“get it” is if a student were ever so hopelessly naive as to ask a professor a
question of real consequence instead of a question that buttressed the
correctness of the dismal world view by merely asking for a further example or
a clarification of method. Imagine a sophomore in any one of the humanities or
social sciences asking the professor, “I understand that most socio–historical
events as we have described them are the result of whoever is in power
protecting their own position as a result of some combination of greed and fear,
which is really quite simple to understand, like Pavlov’s dog, and deadly in its
consequences. But if we all agree on these concepts, could you tell us if you,
personally, think there is any point to human existence?”
I deliberately chose a sophomore because it is just possible that a freshman
might not yet have internalized the catechism of higher education. This
unwritten dictum is that such questions are outside the boundaries of allowable
academic inquiry. The professor’s immediate defense against any such rogue
question is, if she is kind, “Well, that’s something we’ll never know, I don’t
suppose. After all, no one has ever proved what the meaning of life is
yet.” (Followed by a polite titter of knowing laughter) If the professor is more
bitter for having the stride of his marvelous disquisition on human corruption
broken, he might snap instead, “Come on now! If you want to know the meaning
of life, why don’t you go to some church or other? I’m sure there is no shortage
of preachers willing to make life easy for you. Are there any real questions out
there? Otherwise, let’s move on.”
Suppose a student were so persistently obdurate (in the view of the
academy) as to insist that she has a right to ask such questions. After all, she had
been told that the most important object of inquiry for humanity is humanity
itself ! She might conclude that if we already know that this study is no more
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elucidating than an ever–more elaborate set of rules for a meaningless game,

then she doesn’t choose to spend a half–dozen years and thousands of dollars to
get it, when she “gets it” already. And of course her leaving is no threat at all to
the institution, her professors, or peers. After all, they don’t even have to tell her
the unassailable response, for that has been hammered into every college student
as well. “If you want a good job, you have to get a good education, and that
means a college degree. Period.” (For an example of one 18 year old student’s
solution to just such a state of affairs, see “How I Got My D.I.Y. Degree,” by
William Upski Wimsatt, Utne Reader, May–June, 1998.)
No, I do not believe that the primary “ problem” so often talked about
concerning students’ apathy is some character flaw that, amazingly and for the
first time in human history, afflicted the gene pool of an entire generation. Nor
do I believe that it is generated by vacuous media, although as it reflects a lack of
courage in society at large to look squarely for hope, dignity, and meaning in the
human experience, our entertainment seeks to fill its own existential vacuum
with cheap surrogates to authentic living. The reason why students of any age
do not find their studies compelling is because there is no vision behind it. There
is no sense of positive adventure, that despite the many examples of cruelty,
humankind is ultimately on its way somewhere, and that we are capable of
consciously evolving.
To see evolution in the history of human consciousness (beyond a global
economy and more sophisticated ways of inflicting injustice), one does not even
have to begin with the sense of the spiritual, mystical or ineffable for meaningful
patterns to emerge. Even within the abbreviated conversation allowed in “
proper” academia, it takes a deliberate act of cynicism to refuse to see large sea
changes in consciousness. The very things that are broadly considered to be
major problems found throughout contemporary cultures in varying degrees,
such as ethnic hatreds, the rights and education of women, the yawning
disparity between haves and havenots, and the interconnected sweep of
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environmental breakdowns, have only found their voices in common discourse of

human concerns within the last few decades. We can find their exceptional voices
in the previous century and in certain cases before, but, I remind my own
students, that even as recently as when I was in college, there was no axiomatic
privilege for these questions to enter the debates of learned communities. When
these issues were engaged, it was decidedly a fringe activity. And whatever the
challenges we face, the very first essential stages toward major social changes
occur when issues move from the utterances of the fringe, who are most
sensitive to seeing the symptoms of illness, and into general conversation.
The challenge for us all is to see these times of great shift as the most
powerfully exciting times to be alive. It is a time that calls for the emergence of
the visionary, and not a single vision or visionary, but a more generous
expression of envisioning among many people. It seems to be simply a human
trait to bifurcate at times of great challenge. One response (the most common) is
driven by fear, and the other by opportunity, and these two generative forces can
be expressed in the same individual from one day to the next. At times these
distinct motivations (the push of fear versus the pull of opportunity and positive
visions) can even generate the same resolution of response to the problem,
though this is not often the case. Even when the course of action is the same, the
FEELINGS inhabited by those whose overarching sense is predominated by fear
and those who are most accessible to a sense of emerging opportunity are
radically different.
The fear–dominated response can move some to action, but it can equally
well result in hatred, denial, or apathy. The historian T. J. Jackson Lears
described one common modality of response to successive crises of meaning for
individual and social life, occurring at the turn of the twentieth century, as “
antimodernism.” During a time when the fruits of the scientific revolution had
become signatures of everyday life, making the ideas behind a clockwork
universe manifest everywhere on the landscape; and when professional titles,
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closely linked to consumerism, had already begun to assert themselves as the

most valid measure of what one had achieved in life, or more precisely what
one’s life meant, there was a potent reactionary social movement. This response
included renewed interest in crafts, and various nature movements, including the
formation of the Boy Scouts, intended to reconnect people to some vital moral
center in the outdoors. Those individuals who sensed a dissolution of meaning
without any acceptable replacement suffered a brand new malady, labeled by the
medical profession of the time as “ neurasthenia,” whose symptoms included a
lack of ability to do almost anything, including getting out of bed, and whose
common medical remedy often included some compound containing cocaine.
The reactionary responses can have much to offer and do include important
restorative themes during times of radical change. We have seen them re-
emerge during other times of upheaval, such as the communal experiments of
the 1960’s. But to the extent that they are most centrally driven by a rejection of
the current evolution of consciousness—finding humanity’s growth stages
simply toxic, and supposing that at some more primitive stage we were somehow
morally and spiritually superior—they are a cultural anxiety response with no
anchor in reality. They have the same flavor and context as the adult who,
finding himself overwhelmed with the world of adult action and responsibility,
actually imagines he would be happy if he could just return to the life of his
childhood. Such fancies about the state of humanity look through the same
reality-bending lens as any individually experienced paralyzing phobia or
generalized anxiety. Unable to see through to the other side of whatever event
or circumstance they confront, these individuals choose instead to create false
safehouses for their psyches, made from whole cloth or patched together from
various misconceptions regarding the course of human consciousness and the
nature of human nature.
There are several severe consequences that arise when trying to solve local
and global problems within a world view whose primary driver is fear. No doubt
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fear has always been an effective organizing principle in human history. But
because it finds common discourse in what we find a threat, fear is usually not
generative of multiple, positive visions (the pull of the human spirit) but rather
finds strength in a monotonic revulsion (the push of terror and pain avoidance).
One can only be in a state of fear or panic for a limited time until one becomes
sick, exhausted, and depressed. This debilitation is true for the individual as well
as for societies or generations. But the root of the problem with fear–driven
action goes much more deeply than simply our limited ability to keep a stiff
upper lip regardless of how hopeless we perceive things to be. It is the very
shrillness of the singular response it unleashes, the lack of creative diversity,
that is the most deadly.
Everything we can intuit about life—from the literal biological survival of
the organism to the evolution of life forms, to the cosmos, to the most vibrant
examples of human civilization—craves diversity, even insists on it.
Monocultures of any sort bring about their own destruction. Cancer is simply
monoculture in motion, a perverse substitution of the life–giving dance of
change for the death-dealing multiplication of amount. It represents a part of
the body that no longer knows how to converse with the rest of the body, to
modulate and differentiate, but instead obeys one dictum only: keep doing more
of the same. In human discourse, the only absolute indicator of a “dead
language,” for instance, is stasis. Any language that can, once and for all, be
completely elaborated in a dictionary, is necessarily a language that is no longer
in daily use. It is only completely definable because it is dead. Complete stasis
(definability) is the physiological difference between a body just before and after
death. It is the same with ecosystems, religions, or systems of ethics and
government.
Perhaps we have had too many supposed validations of the aphorism
“nothing unifies like a common enemy,” but if we think this justifies fear as a
creative organizing principle for an indefinite future, we are deliberately
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deceiving ourselves, deliberately truncating our available data. If our primal

response is to see challenges as enemies, rather than open–ended possibilities,
the power of this least-common–denominator motivation will necessarily devour
every bit of divergence, including that within ourselves that spurs new thought,
until we prevail in producing unanimity, which is death: intellectual, spiritual,
physical. The different natures of fear versus opportunity in provoking change is
not a trivial distinction, or a mere shading of meanings. It lies at the very core of
what we think life, our own and the collective human experience, is about. It
requires our constant attention to avoid this easy, reflexive default position
toward the world.
The most obvious example of our attraction for action based upon the
unifying force of a common enemy is the persistent recurrence of armed conflict
itself. Wars may be enjoined under the banner of some positive–sounding ideal
(usually freedom from some sort of oppression), but it only finds its combative
focus by identifying a specific target that stands in the way of realizing this
ideal, and killing it. The susceptibility of humans to find immediate motivation
for action through the language of warfare is echoed in so many of our
crusades. Problems are, and should be seen as, the true gifts of thoughtful living.
They are challenges for meaningful, collaborative, and creative synthesis that
will produce new contexts to further vision beyond what we can presently know,
and the wisdoms, syntheses, and mutualities they can call forth are certainly
different from the mere absence of infection by some evil invader. But it is far
more easy to see our challenges as merely killing the invader, whether that be a
microbe, an army, or an idea. And so we are prone to name our various
adventures wars, whether that be the war on cancer, a war against the ungodly,
the war against poverty, or, most bizarrely incoherent, a war against intolerance.
The metaphor of warfare does not admit of any greater point to human
existence than a continual struggle from the latest fall into some diseased tar pit,
gasping back to ground level. And wars can proceed in several ways. They can
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drag on endlessly, such that the entire context of life, even multi–generationally,
is a grim, teeth–grinding proof of persistence against overwhelming odds. We
do have authentic examples of the possibility of nobility when such conditions
are forced upon an individual or a people, and we shouldn’t take these examples
lightly. When individuals continue to find purpose and insight through a life that
is an enforced nightmare when seen externally, the real lesson is the shining
beacon of hope and meaning in even the darkest recesses of experience.
Sometimes we celebrate that, and that celebration is also a noble act. But without
the ability to envision more to suffering and endurance than as another kind of
warfare, we haplessly fall into an uncritical and perverse celebration of
individual despair itself, thinking, romantically, that despair and anger are
somehow made of the same stuff as positive striving.
Well, we might say, at least self destruction has emotion in it, and as such,
without the capacity to envision for ourselves, it is somehow more authentic to
be terminally self pitying or destructive than to seek genuine purpose and joy,
for oneself and others. Despair makes for popular movies. Sometimes heroism
can make a blockbuster as well, but it must always be cast in terms of finding the
enemy and killing it (literally or figuratively), and after the protagonists have
killed the enemy in the film’s climax, the film invariably ends, preferably with the
protagonist dying in the process because we just don’t have emotional juice for
creative continuance. We don’t know what to do with the character or the story.
There are a few exceptions to this formula in literature, cinema, and other
expressive arts, but they rarely find critical praise, unless, perhaps, the stories are
so far temporally removed from us that we can afford to grant them some
dignity while keeping our precious cynicism about contemporary life intact.
There is much to be gleaned from pain, from suffering and melancholy.
Recognizing this truth is not the same as saying that everything can be learned
from these contexts, much less that everything of value MUST be learned from
these contexts alone.
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If any crusade that is enjoined solely for the immediate emotional endorphin
release of warfare does not continue, consuming its shock troops in endless
attrition, then it must find some affective substitute as a follow-on. Once you
have conquered the known universe by vanquishing the enemy, what do you do
with it? Again, if you are addicted to the metaphor of warfare, you become a
kind of moral mercenary, looking for your next fight and feeling dead in
between these episodes. Another option is to find a new context that provides
the same sense of motion-in–striving as fighting an enemy does. However,
lacking the ability to ask important questions and to envision the beauty of a
continual process of an evolving human consciousness (with all its erratic
sidestepping and backtracking included), one settles for virtually any path that
seems continually to create a distance between striving and fruition. Among the
most infectious and addictive surrogates for meaningful envisioning and striving
is material acquisitiveness. The spiritual wasting away that attends
acquisitiveness would never suffice to keep introspection at bay by simply having
stuff. Rather, it can only blunt the search for purpose if one is willing to accept
one’s position and meaning in the world using the relative distinction between
how much stuff one has and others have. Many other surrogates besides
material acquisitiveness exist, and we will visit the subject of surrogates and
their qualities more fully in Chapters 4, 5, and 6.
There is another way to find meaning in existence. It is distinct from
continually fighting one endless war, distinct from shopping about for the latest
battle, distinct from pursuing surrogate targets for fulfillment, and most
certainly distinct from the romance of despair. Envisioning is this other
possibility, and ultimately, that is the theme of this book. It involves a change of
heart every bit as much as a change in intellectual posture. It can be taught, but
not linearly or didactically, and I do not presume that a book is sufficient of itself
to illuminate the practice of envisioning. In some combination of wisdom
traditions both East and West, it must be practiced; it should be reflected upon
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for its own sake. Adumbrations of its power and beauty are best evinced through
example, and the experience of seeing (and feeling) with a heart of envisioning
often occurs when you think you are doing something else.
At this point I cannot provide a better window on the distinction between a
cultivation of the envisioning stance and all other attitudes toward existence
than through allegory. In 1884, an English schoolmaster, Edwin A. Abbott,
published an imaginative little story, Flatland: a romance of many dimensions. It is
a most remarkable satire of the overpowering tendency for all creatures to be
completely saturated with the “ facts” of their world as they appear to them and
as are commonly agreed upon by social discourse. It is even more concerned
with the abject terror (and rejection) that arises when a society is told that their
entire articulated context, the obvious realities and patterns of everyday life,
represent but ONE way to construct meaning. While these meanings are valid
enough within that society’s postulates of fundamental truths, the entire set of
patterns can be observed from another vantage point, revealing that their
assumed eternal verities were but the surfaces of deeper truths.
The central character, A. Square, lives in a two–dimensional world known as
Flatland. The story is written as a retrospective, so Mr. Square is able to explain
to us, the inhabitants of Spaceland, not just the social and ethical norms of
Flatland, but why they make sense if you only have two dimensions in which to
work. Square’s description of Flatland living includes an elaboration of social
castes (by geometric shape), of communication, recognition and cognition, and
so on. Since the number of sides a citizen has as a polygon, Mr. Square is clearly
just a regular stiff, nobody special, whereas if you have so many sides as to
become nearly indistinguishable from a circle, one is an exalted priest. It is A.
Square’s fate (one might as easily call it a miracle of salvation or a burden of
damnation) to meet up with a sphere, who, in moving through space, passes
through Flatland. The sphere’s intersection appears first as a point and then an
expanding circle, and so on. It turns out that this sphere is an emissary from
22
Spaceland, on a once–in–a–thousand–year mission to find and anoint an apostle

from among the inhabitants of lesser dimensional worlds who will tell others
about the existence of Spaceland.
I will not recount the entire story, but I wish to mention some of the most
poignant plot elements. As it turns out, no amount of descriptive language can
move Mr. Square to grasp this other dimension, completely absent from his
world. The direction “up” is continually construed as “north” since there is no
up in flatland. Even the movements of Sphere, in passing through Flatland and
changing his aspect for Square does not help. Square is frightened that he is just
seeing some deceptive apparition. Finally, in a desperate attempt to rescue this
once per millennium mission, Sphere actually lifts Square out of Flatland, to
float in space. And at first Square becomes terrified by this new dimension that
has no place in his world; he cannot make sense of perspective and, horrified to
see “the insides” of his countrymen, he becomes quite ill. However, several
remarkable transformations happen in rapid succession.
First, once Square perceives the third dimension, he becomes giddy at the
prospects of this greater reality. Certainly, he tells his mentor, there must be
some way of “moving” even three-dimensional objects in yet another dimension
—as distinct as the third dimension is from the second—and produce yet even
more wonderful entities, like supersheres or supercubes. The important thing
was that Square had actually SEEN the transformation once, and that revelation
was the most world–shattering vision imaginable. It would not be nearly so
shocking to continue to manifest higher states of being through similar
transformations. But not so for Sphere, who saw Square as a diminished
consciousness to be raised to higher awareness. Even Sphere did not get the vital
truth of the transformation of vision itself, and was just as dogmatic about his
own existence as being the truest and highest manifestation of reality.
In the story, Sphere finally relents his own dogma, and, admitting that he
could indeed learn from his student, they proceed together to experience worlds
23
of higher dimensionality before Square is returned to Flatland to evangelize for

the existence of Spaceland. Despite his many attempts to elucidate his vision, he
cannot succeed in telling his compatriots exactly where “up” is, anymore, as
opposed to just “north.” He is imprisoned for heresy, and spends the rest of his
days trying to tell his very occasional visitors that what he experienced was real,
not just hallucination. But having lost his access to this realm and finding no
way to jar any sense of recognition with others, he falls into despair as the tale
ends.
“Upward, not Northward,” haunts me like a soul–devouring Sphinx. It is part
of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of the Truth that there are seasons
of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of
scarce–possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as
visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me
my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and all the substantial of
Flatland itself, appear no better than the offspring of a diseased imagination, or
the baseless fabric of a dream. (Abbott)
One may well see in this little parable the same intentions sought by Plato
in his Cave Allegory. Perhaps because I am somewhat of a spatial thinker that
Abbott’s story is more vibrant, more resonant for me when trying to describe
the somewhat aerial view of existence that provides meaning through
envisioning, and I have found it evocative as a teaching tool. Furthermore, while
there have been episodes in my own journey that have felt much like the
doubting despair of A. Square, I must say that it has become easier, over time,
rather than more difficult, to maintain the envisioning perspective and to feel its
reality.
For one thing, the joy of recognition in my students always brings me back
to envisioning as a lived experience, a touchstone to real purpose and what really
is, rather than just an act of brute will and suspended disbelief. Furthermore, it
has been my happy experience to discover how much company I have in this
24
world view among those I know personally and those I know only through their
writings. Some of these individuals have been around for ages, and why I did not
find their visions speaking to me until later in life I cannot say for sure. It may be
only my personal availability to these visionaries that announces their presence
to me from so many places and times, but it does also seem a reality that our
present culture is seeing the beginnings of a flourishing of envisioning, deeper
and broader than what we have seen before, although, at the same time, the
competing voices from Flatland are far more numerous and insistent than ever.
To return briefly to the world of the student, then, to the extent that adults
find them disengaged or out of touch, we must be careful not to attribute this
disaffection to some utterly unexplainable defect of character. Nor is it some
immense cabal of everyone, under a certain age threshold, meeting in secret and
deciding with wicked glee to appear disconsolate and directionless to adults as a
way of tweaking their collective noses. It is, in fact, a most natural response to a
culture whose most singular characteristic is to motivate constantly by fear of
every sort of imminent collapse (and these mentors are called idealists), or by the
cotton candy surrogate motivation of getting lots of stuff (these mentors are
called realists), and even the latter are much better at wielding the push of
threat (if you DON’T do thus and so, you WON’T have ANY stuff) than any
valid pull of meaningful vision. Both of these modes of motivation are nothing
more than Abbott’s Flatland at the leading edge of existential crisis.
Furthermore, it must be mentioned, even with the relative rarity of visionary
mentoring, many young people are going to great lengths to find positive visions
and mentors on their own.
I hope it is also clear by this point that I am not trying to describe the
particular construction of some future utopia. First of all, I think any singular
visions of a well–delineated future “good society” are missing the point, at best,
and dangerous at worst. The point of our collective evolution is not a point at
all, but rather continual strivings whose successive plateaus contain elements
25
more exquisite than our current imaginings. But, on the other hand, to make any
positive sense of that evolution, to be generally motivated by the lovely and
freeing vision of opportunity, as opposed to being alternately shocked by fear or
in a refractory state of numbness, requires something of an aerial view of life,
rather than just a series of meaningless reflex responses to painful stimuli.
When students (and we are all students) can apprehend and feel that there is a
different way of understanding their lives and their connections, laterally
through larger spheres of society and vertically through generations, they
become eager, creative learners, and they operate on the pull of visions, which is
the growing field of creative departures.
What I hope to present are reflections as they simply have evolved through
a combination of experience, conversation, and reconnaissance. I would hope
that these essays may serve as points of departure, indicating more the feel of
operating on vision rather than fear. Most, if not all, of the ideas contained
herein have an elaborate genealogy from other writers, past and present, but to
admit such does not reduce the whole to mere repetition. Just as a composer does
not write a piece of music so that its excellence and universality will relieve
anyone so prompted from the burden of ever writing another symphony, I feel
moved to record these reflections because they are my best attempt to express
something of beauty. Also, the generative episodes for these essays come with a
healthy dose of actual experience, a reporting from the field of what I may call
applied philosophy, in the presence of others, for whom these modes of inquiry
seemed to invite a resonance of spirit, and a recognition of the sense of
“upward, not northward.”
26
27
Persistence of Visions (reflections on living from the classroom and

elsewhere)
Part One — On Gratitude
A grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and discharg’d
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Chapter 1: Childhood and the intimations of gratitude
! In my family I was the middle child, equidistant in years
between my sister, the oldest, and my youngest of three brothers. I
don’t know much about all the theories of family dynamics that
have been put forth, so I offer this little detail to set a stage only,
rather than to add credence to any concepts of niche roles played

28
by siblings. What I can say, quite simply, with the best honesty and
accuracy of memory I can muster is that my early years were fairly
idyllic. I grew up in what was then a quiet and friendly little
neighborhood in central New Jersey. This was the town where my
father was born, and my father’s father, the only grandparent I
knew well, lived across the street and down several houses. By the
time I was of an age to accumulate memories, my father was
employed as the instrumental music teacher in the local high
school and was known pretty generally among the residents.
My early fond memories seem very dreamlike. We lived in
what had been an old farmhouse that had been exquisitely
remodeled by my father who loved carpentry as an avocation. Our
property had some big old butternut trees on it, one of which had
a thick knotted rope tied to a branch, good for swinging, and which
on occasion had an old automobile tire affixed. We even had a barn
on the property until the land was subdivided and a new house
built on that space. My early memories, then, were of a sublime,
undifferentiated freedom to indulge my imagination. My sister and
older brother were in school everyday, my father at work, my

29

elsewhere)
mother at home, and I was given pretty much free reign to simply
be outside, wandering around the yard, going into the wonderful,
musty, and dark barn or to crawl around under the porch with my
toy trucks. I had found through exploration that one of the lattices
that sealed off the underside of the porch, which was about two
feet above ground level, was broken, and I could fit myself through
the opening, behind an azalea bush, and have this marvelous secret
place to play in the dirt.
I can trace some of my most fundamental passions to this
period, and I will speak of some of these later. But there were
certain parts of that childhood landscape which were simply given,
and it took the retrospect of adulthood to realize what these things
were and to realize that I was fortunate for them as they are not
universal. The most essential ingredients were stability and
security. In that time before I had much ability to reckon time and
its passing, there was a sense that I simply existed in a context that
30
probably always was. Perhaps it was the lack of punctuation of the
day-to-day with events that needed attending to that gave the
overall period, from my earliest remembering until I entered
school, such a dreamlike fluidity. Of course, developmental
psychologists would also be quick to point out certain universals in
the sequential unfolding of the self that are fairly robust in the
human species, and which protect the self in layers of unknowing
even when disruption occurs, and I would not dispute this.
Even so, when I do my best reconnaissance of my conscious
paths (from the vantage point of middle age), I am most struck by
how gradually and slowly my senses of self and the world have
seemed to emerge during those early years. I cannot account for
this in a teleological sense, but I am fairly confident in being able to
assay my story as one with only a very few strongly disconcerting
episodes that needed deliberate attention until I was, perhaps,
eighteen years old! After that age, there were, to be sure, a number
of truly seismic and wrenching episodes, but I had been given
many years of very gradual modulation and accommodation from
which I derived significant strength and comfort. I say that I have

31

elsewhere)
confidence in the accuracy of this account, in part because I have
kept personal journals for all of my adult life. And it is this
journaling that has helped not simply to keep track of my story
but has deepened that story and made it more precious and
wondrous. The very best word I can put to the overarching
coloration of the world that springs from paying attention to and
honoring my life story is gratitude. But it has taken many years for
me to be able to embrace the quality of gratitude as a theme for
living, and as a most powerful entity in its own right, and not
simply a byproduct or cofactor of something else. It is difficult to
say with any precision when I first apprehended the state of
gratitude as something beyond an ephemeral sensation or
response, for that has truly been heuristic in nature, accumulating
and coming into awareness over several decades. But I can recall a
snapshot instance from before that process began with any
regularity.
32
Like most every child, from an early age I looked forward
with eager anticipation to birthdays and holidays. The most salient
features of these occasions were family gatherings, special foods,
but mostly the promise of presents. Presents for me! We would
make an event out of decorating for Christmas, most especially, and
it was exciting to put up the tree, to decorate it, and (a task I took
most seriously) my older brother and I would set up the electric
train to go around the base of the tree. But this was really all just
prelude, and a suspension of the real payoff which was opening
presents the next morning. Perhaps the most painful part of the
whole process occurred after my father got one of the early home-
movie cameras, an eight millimeter windup job. The preparations
of the night before I thoroughly enjoyed, but once I woke up there
was only one thing on my mind--get down to the tree and see what
I got.
After the camera arrived, however, this final climax was
again delayed. My sister, brother and I would come down the stairs
filled with greedy excitement (at least I was), only to be told by our
mother “Don’t open any presents yet! Wait until Daddy gets the
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elsewhere)
camera set up!” After all, what was the magic of having a home
movie camera for, if not to capture for time and all eternity the
spontaneous, undiluted joy of children awakening to the wonders
beneath the tree on Christmas morning. Even more unfortunately,
these early movie cameras were not ready for prime time, not really
appropriate for capturing anything unexpected. First there was a
hand-held bank of flood lights which my father would have to wire
up and check for faults. These were serious lights. They could only
stay on for a few minutes until the whole thing became too hot to
hold, and just being in their path of illumination was enough for
sunburn and dehydration.
So, of course, I had sneaked down earlier to count how
many presents were marked for me, to weigh them and shake them,
to see which ones held some really fantastic toy that I had made
certain had lodged firmly in my parents’ memory, and which ones
might contain something completely undesirable, like mittens,

34
which I knew I would be provided with anyway so why waste
perfectly good space under the Christmas tree with such essentials.
And after all this assessment of my prospects, I knew that I
couldn’t open anything until “it was time,” and that wouldn’t occur
until my father was in full Cecil B. Demille. And to completely set
the stage for what was certainly going to be a cinematic classic in
the Kellogg archives, this also entailed getting entrances from us
kids as we descended the staircase into the living room. I would be
in my slipper-pajamas, and my older siblings were more maturely
presented in bathrobes, and we would have to come down the stairs
as my father filmed and my mother called out directorial prompts
from the wings. “Okay, now come down the stairs slowly. No, one at
a time now. Okay, Buzzy (that was my nickname, which has over
the years vestigialized to the essential “Buzz”), now look over at the
tree, okay Brian, now you....okay, and Linnea.” If we didn’t get it
right, or my father’s machinery malfunctioned, we had to wait (for
a fuse to be replaced, for the lens cap to be removed, etc.) and go
back up the stairs and do it again. The procedure continued while
we opened presents, especially our main, or most important (from

35

elsewhere)
our parents’ point of view) present. As I look back on those years,
this was the closest thing to child abuse that I suffered.
Now, it certainly wasn’t the case that we actually did
anything with these films once they were taken. Once developed,
we watched them, and without fail the closest thing to artistic
surprise we experienced was recognizing ourselves. We did show
them on rare occasions when we had some close relatives over, and
the only entertainment value was evinced in one aunt or uncle
marveling over how much one of us had grown in just a single
year. And I don’t think it was simply the novelty of it that
attracted my parents to the Christmas filming ordeal. They wanted
to document the children as they grew up, certainly. And they
wanted a record of the joy peculiar to a known event. Today these
procedures are much easier, and much more forgiving of the
possibility of a missed moment with the advent of home video, and
this is now ubiquitous. But at that time it wasn’t so simple, and in

36
fact I didn’t know anyone else, among friends, neighbors, or
relatives who was subjected to the Kellogg-Kodak torture ritual.
It was sometime during this period that the thought
occurred to me that the experience of gift-giving was
fundamentally different for my parents, the givers, and for me, the
givee. They were really happy to give stuff away, and this seemed
to me to be both obviously the case and completely inexplicable. I
couldn’t say that I didn’t like the experience of giving since I had
never given anything away, but as I pondered it, I was certainly
glad that there were people who did enjoy this at the same time
that I couldn’t fathom the attraction. For kids there is a formal
process whereby we are accounted as giving gifts, but I knew this
to be a sham and I didn’t for a second think that everyone else did
not know it as well. This was the process whereby someone else
(my parents) would get a present for someone and put my name on
it. I would of course be thanked for the gift, but by sometime
around age eight this started to become embarrassing to me. I
knew that what was going on was something fundamental that
separated me from what everyone else was doing.

37

elsewhere)
It may very well have been this simmering embarrassment
that prompted me to try out this gift-giving thing. So one year I
told my mother that I wanted to know what it was all about since I
was now convinced that I was completely in the dark about this. I
remember asking my mother why people gave gifts, really. In truth,
I don’t remember how she responded at first, but I am fairly
confident that it was something about giving gifts because you love
someone or like them, and that while a present isn’t that love itself,
it lets the other person know how you feel and it makes them
happy. What I do remember is that my mother’s genuine response,
in words she thought I could understand, made no sense to me, and
even alarmed me a bit because I still didn’t get it. In fact, I think it
was probably similar to the time I asked my parents about “the
facts of life,” having been prompted to ask that question by my
older brother while seeing some rabbits involved in the act and
thinking they were fighting... and asking my brother why someone

38
didn’t stop them. That first explanation, delicately worded (as my
parents were very much old school in those things), completely
eluded me as it had no correlation to my experience. I found out
later that my older brother was in the other room listening to the
whole thing, including my bizarre questions as I tried to get
clarification, which sent him rolling on the floor with his hands
over his mouth to stifle the laughter. But that was another time.
I pushed further on the issue of giving and asked for
details. Exactly what happens? What happens to you when you
give me a present? What do you do? What do you look for? Finally
she said that it was enjoyable to see the look, the surprise, on my
face when I opened a gift. She probably said more, but this was the
one observation that made sense to me. This was operational. This
was outwardly physical. This was within my experience. You bet.
Even at that age I had felt joy in some things, including just seeing
something new and not necessarily something that I would own. I
thought the Three Stooges were funny to watch, and I knew that
laughing made me happy even though it wasn’t something physical
that I would own. Great. That’s enough. I’ve got someplace to

39

elsewhere)
start. There is something about this giving process that I knew I
could understand, something I had already experienced (happiness
in something I had seen, but would not own) that I could translate
into this other sphere and then watch for it. In a very fundamental
way, I think, I had some vision that this single insight would help
move me toward the world of adults, that is the idealized world of
adulthood from which I felt completely apart and distinct.
There isn’t a grand finale to this little vignette, some huge
awakening of spirit, but I’ll finish the episode for closure and to
put it in proper perspective. I remember that I did determine to
buy a present for someone else. My elementary school was having
some kind of rummage sale in the gymnasium, and I a found a
little trinket and bought it for my brother Brian. It was a plastic
horse’s head, replete with a synthetic mane, the base of which was
a pencil sharpener. It cost me fifty cents, which happened to be
exactly the amount of money I had, so it was also the only present
40
I bought. This was my big entree into a very adult performance—
giving because you want to. Granted, my reasons for wanting to
were quite distant from those my mother explained. It would be
some years before I would come to understand that I really did love
my brother. At that time I knew only that he was someone I was
supposed to love while I thought of him as the one who would lead
me around by squeezing my neck when no one else was watching.
The big moment came. Brian had MY present in his hand,
and I wanted to be sure he knew that this was not somebody else’s
present with my name stuck on, so I told him that I bought it at
school. I was eagerly awaiting for my brother to break into some
wild emotional dance of surprise, like a cartoon character who got
plugged into an electrical outlet, even though I had never seen him
do that before. But then again, he had never before actually gotten a
present from ME before, his little brother, so, since I lived in a
Buzzy-centric universe, it wouldn’t be outside of human
comprehension that the heavens would open wide and cherubim
and seraphim would proclaim creation’s fulfillment at this moment.

41

elsewhere)
It wasn’t that Brian acted badly, not at all. As I remember it,
he was very nice, acknowledged the gift and thanked me, and gave
me a perfunctory hug. Considering the reality of this little, hollow
plastic figurine with a pencil sharpener (which he probably never
used), I now see this as a pretty generous response for a twelve-
year-old. But I was looking for a sign from the heavens, and this
wasn’t it. I also don’t think it disturbed me for more than a few
minutes since, after all, there were presents of my own to attend
to! However, I don’t remember returning to the urgency of giving
gifts myself for a few more years. I had tried the experiment, and
basically gotten a null result. I could live with the incongruity that
there still was something going on for my parents that was out of
my realm of understanding for the time being. If they really get a
lift from giving gifts, I’m all for helping them out in any way I can.
By present lights something much more significant

42
happened through that little episode than even the foreshadowing
of a desire to understand something beyond my own little
interests. It was the search for correlates, and the engagement of
an experiment. Forty years later, it seems to me that what
happened that Christmas was not just a funny little snapshot from
childhood. Instead, it seems that subsequent missions to discover
meaning, values, and purpose have been essentially the same
experiment, more sophisticated, perhaps, and with more history to
bear, but withal the same initially tentative explorations. What
seems most surprising, though, is that all these years later the
answer I was seeking to that initial, painfully naive question of
“why give?” is central to everything else I have sought and found
thereafter. That answer is gratitude.
At its most fundamental level, gratitude is a condition of
the heart that simply is, that doesn’t need explanation. In fact, it
seems to defy definition. There is an analogous concept in physics,
which goes by the name of fundamental quantity. In classical
mechanics there are only a few fundamental quantities: time,
length, and mass. A combination of these three quantities are the

43

elsewhere)
only ingredients in Newton’s laws of motion, but it is not possible
in Newtonian physics to eliminate any one of these three and still
explain the world. A definition of any one of these necessarily
involves the others. What is length? Well, you know, it is like the
space between this point and that one over there? Really. What
kind of space? Well, you know, it’s like how long it takes to get
from here to there. What if I go fast or slow? Well, yeah, if you go
faster then you get there sooner. What do you mean by fast? Well,
it is how much length you go through in, say, one second of time.
And so on. One is left, finally saying, “Okay, we have to agree
simply that a second is a measure of time, and I can show you
things linked by time like snapping my fingers every second and
saying something like, you know, what it felt like when I snapped
my fingers and then didn’t snap them and then snapped them
again. Well one of those feelings we both had when I wasn’t
snapping, that was an awareness of time passing.”

44
If you think that the preceding imaginary dialogue is silly,
that is precisely because we are talking about a fundamental
quantity. And in fact, although the exercise seems futile, it is
extremely valuable to practice if one has never done it before, as it
can reveal extraordinary aspects of what we consider to be most
essentially human. The above dialogue is something I have used
when I taught physics. It reveals the power and necessity of
making assumptions, but especially of recognizing what one’s
assumptions are. Invariably, when I have challenged beginning
physics students to define one of the three fundamental quantities
in Newton’s mechanics, they first became perplexed or annoyed,
but they soon gave way to wonderment that there are certain
things that we simply have to put into the category of “Well,
you’re human like I am, and therefore you know what I mean.” If
one is trying to define time, for instance, you can stand next to
someone with a watch or pendulum and snap your fingers as it
moves and say something like, “Okay, see that, do you have that
rhythm, well while you were waiting for the pendulum to come
back again, that feeling of anticipation is the feeling you get when
45

elsewhere)
you notice time going by.” Ultimately, what we are depending upon
is that the FEELING of anticipation is so fundamentally human
that we can call upon the other person to note that feeling, assume
it is the same as ours, and then say that that is the feeling
associated with paying attention to time. We have to at least
assume that every human being simply knows what it feels like to
anticipate something, anything. If that is not shared, there is no
way to communicate anything about time. In fact, conversation
itself is not possible.
But notice what else is going on in such an exchange. For
one thing, time itself is still not defined, and there is no such thing
as “having” it. All we can discuss are all the responses that attend
the perception of time, of living through it. Even the mental
concept of simultaneity doesn’t get us further back in getting hold
of the fundamental quantities and qualities of time. Once we agree
that we simply have to accept a common sense of fundamental

46
quantities and qualities (and the same holds true for mass and
distance), then we can go about devising an entire system for
higher order knowing and description which corresponds in ever
more layered ways to our lived experience. So at the bottom of any
system of knowing is the assumption that there are certain things
we can all say we have a similar sense of, and then move on. But it
is most valuable, every once in a while and in any area of knowing,
to see where our postulates are, and if they truly are fundamental.
We get our first paths in toward such deep knowing by noticing
what we don’t bother to explain, and then examining how we say
we know what it is we are talking about.
Although I could not have put it in such terms at the time,
this is exactly what I, as a young child, was doing when I asked my
mother about giving a present. And the very best I could do at the
time was to latch on to some kind of experience that I had in
common with what my mother was telling me. At the time, the
only commonality was the happiness I had felt upon seeing an
expression of positive surprise in someone else, so I went with
that. It was a first step.

47

elsewhere)
The concept of fundamental quantities and qualities is not
only found in every area of modern academic inquiry, then, but in
all the great wisdom traditions, and, to the extent we are willing to
encourage such contemplation, to the practicalities of everyday
living. Perhaps for Paul the Apostle, the spiritual correlates of
time, length, and mass were “faith, hope, and charity.” In his first
letter to the Corinthians, he spends eight verses enumerating first
all sorts of virtuous actions (giving to the poor, prophesying,
performing miracles) which, if not undergirded by charity, or pure
and selfless love, amount to nothing. Then he lists all sorts of
stances and emotions which cannot be entertained if one is living
through such love (impatience, envy, strife, iniquity, dissembling),
before saying, almost in desperation, that he ached to say exactly
what this spiritual stance was, but words and his own humanness
were not up to the task. One can sense in these passages that there
was a transcendence to be conveyed, an equivalent to “upward but

48
not northward,” and the best he could do was to say that certain
emotions and actions, which he hoped his audience had all
experienced in their lives, attended the heart of one suffused with
perfect love (translated as “charity”) and certain emotions and
actions were absolutely incompatible with such perfect love. But
none of these conditions actually apprehend the thing itself; they
simply attend it.

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elsewhere)
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I
understood as a child, I thought as a child: but
when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then
face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I
know even as also I am known. And now abideth
faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of
these is charity.
—I
Corinthians 11, 12, 13 (King James)
Paul does his level best in this passage to convey an
understanding of a heart that is not governed alone by prescriptive
actions of virtue and proscriptions against evil acts. It is not
because he lacked eloquence that his disquisition is somewhat
tautological, and that he eventually has to repair to analogy. The
best he can do to hold these spiritual qualities before his readers is

50
to give examples of the sorts of ancillary things one might
observe while living in such a state of awareness. The hoped for
connection is that, okay, you have all experienced some semblance
of what I’m talking about just from being human, right? Well, Paul
might be imagined saying to his listeners take the memory of that
and extrapolate it as far as you can. You have all felt a selfless
regard for someone or something at some time in your life, haven’t
you? Well, retrieve that episode and make it perfect and infinite.
That is as good as I can do to describe, here in flatland, what I
mean by perfect love, or charity. And you can’t just get it once and
for all. It comes and goes, for me, Paul, as well as for you because
this feeling is of the spiritual realm, and for the time being, we are
stuck here in flatland. But by setting your mind and heart on those
images and feelings and acting accordingly, you will get better and
better at living in that state of grace. Just start, and you can
because you are human, and the rest will follow.
Every wisdom tradition incorporates elements like the
example above. Every path (whether shamanism, Buddhism,
Hinduism, Judaism, Islam) requires that there be some

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transcendent experience that, however muted in a particular
individual, can be recalled and experienced by anyone, simply by
virtue of being human, and that this experience can be called upon
as a fundamental quantity and quality to serve as an exemplar and
catalyst for deeper experience in this realm. There is some small
number of essential emotional states, images, and performances,
which are so intertwined with the fundamental quantities and
qualities (which themselves cannot be defined), that by practicing
these acts and evoking these states, you are most likely to recognize
the ineffable other and become its familiar; that you may take on its
nature; that you might awaken that pattern in your own being,
which might otherwise remain dormant.
Just how important is it that we recognize what our
fundamental quantities and qualities are in life? So far as I can tell,
it is the most significant aspect of our common humanness. These
are also those elements which so often confound, elude, or

52
exasperate us when confronted with individuals and cultures
distinct from us. One of my favorite examples of psychic freefall
occurs when I have had students read “The Stranger,” by Albert
Camus. The central character, Mersault, is the quintessence of the
individual stripped bare of all cultural expectations who lives his
life as a pure stimulus-response organism. He carries no
internalized states of reflection that might give rise to delusionary
(considered within an existentialist-phenomenological world view)
states, whether guilt, despair, love, or ecstasy. He knows
performative rules such as earning a living, which allows one to eat
and find shelter, and the absence of which are physically
uncomfortable: behavioral stimulus and response. Everyone else in
the story reacts to Mersault, trying to read common connection
between their interior lives and his exterior actions. Mersault
knows how to navigate these rituals for the most part, but the
endless calls for interior resonance are completely senseless to him,
and because they require the work of a response, he finds these
communal conversational rituals annoying. The thematic crux of
the story occurs when he commits a murder. In point of fact, it is

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by chance that he has the revolver at all when he kills someone he
doesn’t know, and about the closest he comes to an explanation of
why he pulled the trigger is that the sun got in his eyes.
The social gravity of this act, be it homicide or
manslaughter, now forces Mersault to have his life evaluated by the
culture at large, in the incarnation of a jury trial. After all, this was
a public event, and society had long ago decided that episodes such
as this could rend the entire fabric that binds societies together if
not accounted for and dealt with. Everyone tries their very best to
locate some human motive by which they might understand this
taking of life, but Mersault continually leaves everyone with
nothing to understand. We all need stories to make sense of things,
even if that story seems inhuman to us. But Mersault has none to
offer, only a sequence of meaningless events, a spreadsheet of what
happened but nothing of any interior state, admirable or
reprehensible.
54
When I have given this book to students and let them
discuss it without any prompting on my part or any background on
existentialism, these students invariably try—and sometimes with
excruciating twists and turns—to find the same humanness in
Mersault, those interior states that we all presume others to simply
possess as a birthright. “Oh,” they say, “I don’t think it was fair that
the trial focused on Mersault’s failure to weep at his own mother’s
funeral! I mean, maybe he was actually so filled with grief that he
was in shock, and even he couldn’t bring himself to say this
because he was in denial, or something.” They work and work,
trying to see how they can create a satisfying story for Mersault
that would explain things the same way we all understand them.
And in doing so, they could easily have been Camus’ jury and
townspeople. This need to feel that, deep down, there are some
unassailable and universal states of heart that we all share in some
degree, some fundamental qualities, is extraordinarily powerful.
After spending some time with Camus and his stranger, the
students have come away with a much more bright awareness of
our assumptions of commonalities in human experience. They

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need to be able to go to that place of considering that all these
deep interiors might be just so much Darwinian behavioral-
affective legacy, as threatening as that very consideration is, if they
are to come away with any understanding of human attributes.
It is important periodically to make the effort to invest
ourselves in possibilities of world views alien to us, and such
exercises are the correlates within the arts, humanities and social
sciences of trying to identify and describe fundamental quantities
in studies of the material world as described earlier. Having given
Camus serious attention, however, I find it difficult not to jump the
gun when I am with my students, and just blurt out, “If we are all
just B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist children, if we are no more than
autonomous attraction/aversion machines and there isn’t anything
more to it, then why did Camus go to all the trouble of writing a
book to tell us this? Certainly his central character never would
have, and Mersault would have seen his creator’s efforts as a

56
pathetic waste of time. There are easier and more certain ways to
provide for the body’s physical comforts than by writing books.”
But giving students the time and intellectual space to try out ideas,
to be confused, to emend each other’s observations, and to come to
new plateaus of understanding that truly are their own and not
necessarily congruent with my own, this suspension is one of the
exquisite tortures and rewards of teaching.
If nothing else, an exploration like this for students is
valuable as it puts them in an attitude of avoiding judgment and
congruence too rapidly when confronted with new experience.
That very hesitation and embrace allow nearly every action,
observed or performed, every encounter and conversation to be a
catalyst for creative departure and life-changing insight. It
cultivates a love of surprise rather than a fear of it. We sometimes
mistakenly conflate one’s ability to inhabit other worldviews as
some defect of character, a relativism born of cynicism or existing
because the person who invests herself in such modes of
apprehension has no core character at all, and is therefore not
challenged by the alien. I am speaking of quite the opposite here.

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By going deeply into fundamental qualities to see what may
survive, to be willing to invest oneself in the world of the other is
an act of greatest affection for life itself. It requires courage born
of gratitude. Without gratitude and wonder, such excursions can
easily bear the mark of a killing ego or dismissive cynicism.
This reminds me of another teaching experience, though
not my own. My wife, Nancy Uber-Kellogg, wrote her dissertation
in the field of rhetoric and composition. Her particular research
involves, as she puts it, “the moments of bafflement, impasse, and
mutuality” that occur when Anglo teachers of writing and
composition work with Native American students. To understand
these engagements, she secured the cooperation of several such
teachers, at state-run colleges and tribal colleges. One particular
episode seems to speak to both an understanding of and respect for
fundamental qualities. One teacher mentioned, in discussing
methods he used in generating dialogue and critique among

58
students about their own writings, an encounter he had after class
with a middle-aged student who grew up on a reservation.
This teacher had been stressing the need for the students to
critique how a particular student had written a story, and he was
frustrated that while the students listened attentively to their
peers, the nearly universal response consisted of nods of assent
indicating that they too understood the story being read. He
wanted them to critique how well the student had written the
story, not whether they agreed that the story had veracity. This
particular woman stayed after class and told the teacher that he
was asking them to do something fundamentally different from
everything they had learned. It was not that they were not able to
critique the stylistics of another student’s story; it was that that
was not the point of telling stories. The point of stories in
community, as she had experienced it, was expressly to find that
resonance of experience, for everyone to find their feet on the
ground in the same acknowledgment of “what is.” The point is to
find occasion to “nod in assent” and thus be connected and
reconnected. Thus, the story needs a hearer, and it is the job of

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that hearer to make the effort, in active listening, to help the story
be true in its deepest sense, not to hold oneself apart and judge the
teller.
The focus of this section of this book is on gratitude, and it
may seem we have strayed far afield from such a simple concept by
this point. And indeed, gratitude is simple, but only by way of its
being a fundamental quality. It is simple if we think of it as we
usually think of fundamental qualities, and that is to say, “you
know what I mean,” and move on to the rest of our conclusions or
explanations. Yet it is the signature of fundamental qualities that
they have a way of seeming to be anything but simple once you
give them their due and, with open heart and mind, probe their
depths. So it is with gratitude.
I don’t wish to give the impression that one could establish
a well-defined and stable taxonomy of spiritual states. At least I
don’t think that I could construct a metaphysical version of

60
Euclid’s Elements. Such a schema would also run contrary to the
intimation I share with some others of a holographic essence of
things as they are, which I’ll take up in the second part of this
book. So, in turning attention upon one particular mode of
consciousness, namely gratitude, I do so because I feel that it is as
close as I have come to a fundamental quality, and because it seems
to be so practically available to us, perhaps the most proximate of
all the transcendent states to daily life.
The first reason why it seems that the experience of
gratitude is so significant in moving beyond flatland is that its very
experience requires one to move beyond one’s individual concerns
and autonomy. Developmental psychologists tell us that we become
aware of others as beings like ourselves, and not simply parts of
the environment to secure things from, somewhere in middle
childhood, perhaps between the ages of six and eight. The glory of
this evolution is that it allows us to participate in a human world of
meaning and not just of cause and effect and our own immediate
needs. I must presume that my readers, having passed through
these stages, will understand that I am making a major distinction

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between gratitude and other experiences like mere happiness or
pleasure, without having to go through an entire catalogue of
everything gratitude is NOT, as Paul the Apostle felt constrained
to do in evoking a response to more difficult concepts like faith,
hope, and charity.

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Chapter 2: Why We Have Forgotten Gratitude: A brief
excursion
Gratitude requires that we be grateful toward something or
someone other than ourselves. It is worth pondering just how
different that single element is from every explanation of how
things work in flatland, and every plan for getting things done, let
alone what it is that is worth doing. Perhaps it is the radical
departure of what we so often call reasonable, rational, and
desirable from the simple experience of true gratitude that
underlies so much of what we hear from so-called gurus of policy
and management, whether in business, international affairs, or the
vast industry called “self-help.” So, I’d like to take a little excursion
here, the historical scenic route, without losing sight of our focus:
gratitude. In doing so I feel I must admit that this is a bit of trying
to get at the thing itself by looking at what it is not, or at least by
getting a glimpse of what happens in its absence.

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elsewhere)
The godfather of the field of expertise known as scientific
management was Fredrick Winslow Taylor, whose work in the
early years of this century are looked upon, correctly, as
revolutionary, but also as a bit odious and somewhat embarrassing
by today’s standards. It was Taylor who first noticed that the
human capital used in the American industrial society had not been
given nearly the attention that the physical capital had. Engineers
had brought real brilliance to bear on the innovations that resulted
in new modes of power and their increasing efficiency, and
industrialist innovators like John D. Rockefeller had given much
thought to maximizing resource interconnections, but in all these
operations there were humans who ran the trains and other
machines, kept books, and performed all sorts of routine duties in
maintaining the humming enterprises.
Taylor decided that the human component needed
attending to in order to maximize the efficiency of the whole
operation. The insight here is based on the assumption that the

64
entire business is not so much like an organism with machines in it,
as that the enterprise was a machine with humans interspersed
through it. While we bristle at such remolding of the human
condition to fit the means of production, the idea was not wholly
new. As historian John Kasson has demonstrated in his monograph
Civilizing the Machine: technology and republican values in America,
1776-1900, the idea had proponents who thought that, with proper
attention,
such accommodations need not result in the human disaster in
health and spirit that one saw in industrial Manchester, England,
but could actually tame our more animalistic tendencies and make
us fitter in essential human virtues.
And so Taylor undertook his famous time studies for shop-
floor management, and began applying his insights for the efficient
restructuring of human tasks and physical layout at industrial sites
while employed by the Midvale Steel Company as an engineer in
1881. The worker was part of the machine, but comprised of

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different stuff, so any sensible engineer would look to find the best
working parameters of a given machine and design work to
comport with it, rather than overloading the machine and having it
seize up from excess heat and be off-line. It only made sense. And
so, one might consider someone shoveling coal into a boiler
furnace. Perhaps one strapping worker might actually take pride,
much like “Yank,” in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, in being able
to wield larger shovelfuls of coal than anyone else. However, a
clever analyst like Taylor might discover through purely empirical
means that this self-same laborer will wear himself out, and that
by taking just half the amount of coal in each shovel will
ultimately prove far more effective in a ten-hour shift. You, as
manager, might have to insist that your proud boiler-room
attendant actually take it easy, within specified boundaries. This
isn’t bleeding-heart humanism, it is just good business practice.
While F.W. Taylor held patents and made many mechanical
engineering innovations, he is most widely known for his

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integration of material production and human factors, outlined in a
little book, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911).
Following Taylor’s example of process engineering and
human factors, the husband and wife team of Frank and Lillian
Gilbreth became management consultants of considerable note.
Lillian was a trained psychologist and Frank an engineer, and
together they perfected the method of work analysis called “time
and motion studies.” These were studies of different kinds of
manual work, essentially a series of stop-action analyses much as
trainers and Olympic team consultants might use in studying the
performance of a race horse or a world-class discus thrower. The
Gilbreths even extended their analyses to the surgical operating
room. The “scientific management” movement spread everywhere,
from running factories, to the urban planning movement, to home
economics. It was Frank Gilbreth who coined the term “therblig,” a
rough, but pronounceable inversion of his last name, to represent
something like a fundamental quantity: it stood for the smallest
unit of identifiable work in a given human task. Two of the
Gilbreth’s children, Frank Jr. and Elizabeth, later co-authored the

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book Cheaper by the Dozen, sentimentally and humorously depicting
the tricks of economizing they had experienced in a home of
twelve siblings run by parents whose strongest chord was
efficiency.
Taylor and the Gilbreths were pioneers acting within a
very sound intellectual framework. That framework, material
efficiency, was a natural outcome of the industrial revolution,
which saw, firsthand, the power of an engineering mindset in
producing goods, and thereby greatly improving the human
condition and the universal pursuit of happiness. At least, in a
material world rapidly losing any stock of its own condition
beyond the commodities we accumulated, the steady rise of that
wonderfully revealing statistical invention, the “standard of
living,” seemed to prove that our condition was undeniably
improving. It is not too great a stretch to say that the engineering
mindset was the intellectual progeny of the Scientific Revolution
birthed two and a half centuries earlier. But whereas the

68
mechanical universe ruminations of Descartes, Galileo, Newton
and a host of others (who successfully killed off their competitors,
the Renaissance Naturalists like Paracelsus and John Dee) might
provoke their contemporary ivory tower philosophers to reconsider
what these bold ideas implied about God, soul, and freedom, it
wasn’t until these ideas were made real and populated the physical
world of everyday living, in transportation, communications, and
modes of work, that there emerged a colloquial sense of the way
things work that could easily spread into the human realm of
everyday assumptions.
Even Taylor himself waxed rhapsodic in envisioning that
material well-being, and the rational approach to solving its
inequities would do more than simply raise the efficiency of
factories, but would redound to the larger good of societies in their
entirety.
“Think of what this means to the whole country.
Think of the increase, both in the necessities and luxuries
of life, which becomes available for the whole country, of

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the possibility of shortening the hours of labor when this
is desirable, and of the increased opportunities for
education, culture, and recreation which this implies. . . .
Soldiering will cease because the object of soldiering will
no longer exist. The great increase in wages which
accompanies this type of [scientific] management will
largely eliminate the wage question as a source of dispute...
Is not the realization of results such as these of far more
importance than the solution of most of the problems
which are now agitating both the English and American
peoples? And is it not the duty of those who are acquainted
with these facts to exert themselves to make the whole
community realize this importance?”
In 1888, before Taylor had detailed his method of
management, Edward Bellamy published a futuristic novel, Looking
Backward, which foresaw a future (perhaps a technological variation
of a Marxist inevitablility) utopia, where the perfection of the

70
mechanized means of production and a scientifically rational polity,
would result in universal well-being. This included the right for
citizens to retire, at age forty, from their various productive labors
needed to keep society producing its goods and services and to
devote the rest of their days to leisure and creative pursuits,
including the arts, crafts, and literature.
So attractive was the vision it depicted that a groundswell
of popular enthusiasm inspired the formation of one hundred and
sixty five “Bellamy Clubs” in the U.S. Between 1890 and 1891.
While lacking the stylistics of great literature, this book inspired
such individuals as John Dewey, Eugene V. Debs, and Thorstein
Veblen, and was a major organizing force for the Populist Party.
Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks listed Looking Backward
as second in importance, only to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, of the
most influential books published since 1885. Indeed, it is not
difficult to place Karl Marx in community with Taylor, the
Gilbreths, and Bellamy. Each was responding to both the evident
productive power of the industrial age, and each thought that the
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benefits of a better distribution of those material blessings would
signal the crowning achievement of human civilization.
Historians, beginning with Richard Hofstadter’s landmark
1955 study The Age of Reform, have found the Progressive Era in
American culture to be a treasure trove for the archeologist of
social change. This period is tightly defined as extending from
1896 to 1920, or including the Presidential administrations from
William McKinley through Woodrow Wilson. For the current
discussion, I would like to expand our chronological window a bit,
through the administration of Herbert Hoover, our first president
who was also a professionally educated engineer, for reasons that
will become obvious. This period has proved so intriguing because
it seemed to shout with every kind of political, social, cultural, and
technological excitement, all within one generation.

72
These social and cultural gyrations were not just ideas for
various stripes of philosopher to consider in theory, but were
responses to facts on the ground: immigration, suffrage,
sweatshops, telephones, automobiles, monopolies, mechanical flight,
electric lighting, cinema, photojournalism, diseases and their cures,
the abandonment of the farm and the population of cities whose
greatest and most common denominator across the ethnic and
cultural constellations was an amusement park. And a world war.
Even if the inauguration of these massive changes and the social
responses to them can be seen in twenty-five years or so of
American history, the essential tenor of how we perceive challenge
and structural response, in government, business, and every area of
life has remained to this day very largely defined by the patterns
progressivism established in the early years of the twentieth
century.
Historians of the last forty years have had no shortage of
themes by which to try and bind together a time and place that, in
retrospect, seem to be so much movement and passion, in so many
directions, all corralled under the moving and protean tent termed
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progressivism. Seeming confederates simultaneously launched
movements for freedom and the abbreviation of freedoms. There
was suffrage and prohibition; religion in the cause of social
rehabilitation and equality, and the specter of intellectual elites
unabashedly advocating a golden future through eugenics; massive
mobilization and consolidation of industries, and policies for
hygiene and worker safety; tremendous energies devoted to
harnessing and harvesting the country’s natural resources
encouraged by government policy, and the rise of a federal
scientific effort to conserve these resources. This was the age of
the heroic inventor, and while patents continued to accumulate in
Thomas Edison’s works, by far the world’s largest research
enterprise for applied physical science in the public interest,
producing a large number of inventions for the public domain in
electronics and aviation, was at the National Bureau of Standards,
often considered in the popular culture to be the bastion of
conservatism by perfecting physical standards of measurement.

74
What, besides the sheer dynamism of activity, could be said to be
the unifying thread of these wildly disparate endeavors?
Much might be said, and has been said, of the collective
consciousness and unconsciousness of that period, of the power of
identifiable symbols, like Lindberg’s flight or Babe Ruth’s slugging
percentage, in both apprehending and defining the spirit of the
times. Perhaps. There is another, seemingly much less romantic
theme that runs through this period, and continues to this day.
That is the siren song of the engineer. It is the theme of an
intellectual technique that brings to bear measurements, standards,
case-study data and problem-specific expertise on any problem, and
then resolutely solves it. It is the perfectly human response to
chaos in the technological age. We may think of the engineer as
the anonymous lab-coated technician, and it is true that there are
very few engineers known to the public. There were several who
managed to personally coincide so exquisitely with a major new
technology that the larger society knew their names, at least for a
brief time. But none achieved the name-recognition immortality of
the great scientists of the same period. They were, different from
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the great philosophers of theory, practical people, whose endeavors
required a certain training, to be sure, but so did farming. They
were us.
Were these changes really as profound to the popular
consciousness as I seem to be implying? Was it just the hype one
might expect at the close of one century and the opening of
another? We could cite endlessly from popular periodicals of the
time marveling in the utopian promise of the age, as well as of the
demonic forces at play. And we could responsibly infer that, since
these were widely read, they must have struck a resonant chord
with the public. A collection of personal journals would be nice,
but these are always rarities for historians. However, we have one
extended journal from the period that seems to rise above all
others in providing a penetrating view of a most sensitive
observer, and one with the experience to synthesize the way very
few individuals are ever afforded.

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The autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams is the
final great work of the preeminent American historian of his time.
First published in 1907 at the age of 65, it provides one of the
most powerful narratives of a life spent dedicated to understanding
the unfolding of human events, experienced first-hand, in all of
literature. Henry Adams was born into the family that nearly
described and circumscribed the political elite that gave birth to the
nation, including Presidents, legislators, and diplomats. He knew
the individuals with power for political world change personally.
He chose the academic life, becoming a professor at Harvard and
traveling widely. His autobiography is written in the third person,
not as a fly on the wall or disinterested reporter, and certainly not
with any pomposity. Instead, his choice of voicing seems to come
from a sort of aerial view, where he could view the entire
panorama of his journey at once while still remaining honest and
intimate.
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He had wrestled greatly to not just account for historical
developments, but to explain them, as the progeny of a long line of
rationalists would naturally do. And so it is most striking that such
a well-respected scholar should not, near the end of his life, simply
sum up his life work with the appropriate trimmings to assure its
coherence and importance to make his peace with mortality and
immortality. Indeed, he did quite the opposite, accounting all his
supposed understanding of historical forces as of almost no
lasting value.
“The attempt of the American of 1800 to educate the
American of 1900 had not often been surpassed for folly; and since
1800 the forces and their complications had increased a thousand
times or more. The attempt of the American of 1900 to educate
the American of 2000, must be even blinder than that of the
Congressman of 1800, except so far as he had learned his
ignorance.”
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What were these “forces” which seemed to break the world
free from an understandable narrative, and a pattern that could be
well understood in trying to apply the lessons of history to
predict, or at least manage, the future? The key, here, is found
several chapters earlier in a section titled “The Dynamo and the
Virgin.” Adams wished to understand the great movements of
human history, not just the account of it, but how to account for it.
Why do regimes rise and fall, why do worldviews hold sway and
how do they decay, why do cultures seem to strive for anything,
what inspires the individual, legendary or common, and what
traces do societies leave behind?
In the west, political and religious history were tightly
intertwined since the Middle Ages. Among the most awesome
artifacts that attest to the worldviews that gave meaning to Europe
of five hundred years ago are the great cathedrals. These were the
magnificent facts on the ground that made manifest their culture’s
destiny. Church and state found a unifying symbol here. Typically a
cathedral was in the making for over a century, so the original
designers and builders would not live to see its full form. The slow
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process of quarrying rock and fitting stone was understandable
close up and piece at a time. But the fully realized structure defies
understanding. The amount of work required to construct a
cathedral, especially considering the methods used, is very difficult
to get one’s mind around.
They remain breathtaking to this day, even with our
skyscrapers and mile-long bridges. But place such a building in a
landscape that is otherwise very nearly horizontal, and to enter is
to experience the very sky splitting open. In a daily world of earth
tones, its stained glass windows shattered the very sunlight into
the most vibrant spectrum and illustrated, for those who could not
read, the moral precepts by which one might hope to enter heaven.
And an earthly choir could indeed sound otherworldly in such a
space that had no relation to anything in the natural world.
Cathedrals were an invocation of the supernatural. Henry Adams
knew his history, and he had been awestruck in the presence of the
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great cathedrals of Chartres and Amiens. His vivid mind could
easily see nation states mobilizing under such standards, even if
the gaze of a particular king or prelate were not directed
heavenward.
Then there was the Chicago Exposition of 1893, the first
world’s exposition to feature electrical lighting. The Chicago
Exposition was a spectacle nonpareil. It featured an outrageous
juxtapositioning of architectures, trying to evoke classical
civilizations from lath, wire, plaster and concrete. It was filled with
the latest mechanical wonders from around the world, as well as
gaudy and sensuous entertainment, the more exotic the better. But
more spectacular than all else, it was filled and outlined with
electric lighting.
It had been just about a century since electricity had made
the transition from occult force of nature to a dependable,
configurable servant. It could literally turn night to day, a truly
Promethean dream if ever there was one. Far more rapidly than
the advent of the steam engine, the electric motor would change
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the working landscape and make the industrial age a fait accompli.
What would it be like for the average individual to cause miracles
at the flip of a switch, to be able to move mountains (of people, of
freight) while hardly lifting a finger? No one, no emperor or king,
had ever been able to create so much “effect” with so little “cause”
as the age of electricity would make possible. How would this
affect our sense of ourselves, our very understanding of life, of
history? These were the sorts of forces Adams was contemplating.
And he would not find his revelation in 1893, but at the Exposition
in Paris, in 1900, on the home turf of the great cathedrals. But his
own words, describing his realization of the inspiration of the old
world in collision with the realities of the world being born are
better than my own.
As he [Henry Adams] grew accustomed to the
great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot
dynamos [electrical generators] as a moral force, much as

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the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed
less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or
daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within
arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely
murmuring—scarcely humming an audible warning to
stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power—while
it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.
Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct
taught the natural expression of man before silent and
infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate
energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was
the most expressive. (Adams)
Adams goes on to contemplate how this vision of both
latent potential among the human race, and its physical reality
captured in the spinning generator before him brought him to see
all previous evocations of power, influence and authority in history
as weak and ineffectual compared to this fact on the ground, and he
was forced to confront his own intellectual framework in
explaining, let alone predicting, the story of humankind.

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Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing
and that the sequence of their society could lead no further,
while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the
sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the
sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’
pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines
at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken
by the sudden irruption of forces totally new. (Adams)
I have found these passages from Henry Adams to be
riveting and even hypnotic, and yet without considerable
background in just how revolutionary this time of breathtaking
change in the culture was, my young students have found them
mystifying or opaque. And for me, as a student of the history of
science, it seems that Adams had found the epicenter of wonder in
these new “forces” as he called them. We have been talking so far
not just about technologies as devices, but as physical exemplars of
the undeniable miracles achieved by pursuing the engineering

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ethic. Of the various engineering disciplines and technologies all
bearing fruits in 1900, nothing could match the production and
control of electricity for historical drama. No realm of natural
philosophy had moved so rapidly from occult (in both the original
sense of the word as meaning “hidden,” as well as the connotations
of mysticism and otherworldliness) to limitless application.
Electricity was primal, and lightning was certainly
associated with fire itself. Static electricity devices could generate
lightning in miniature, and was both a favorite parlor
entertainment for well-heeled Europeans of the eighteenth century
as well as the central signature for the animal magnetism espoused
by Mesmer, as he hypnotized Paris with his cult of transcendental
techniques before the French Revolution. By the turn of the
nineteenth century, Galvani had showed that he could make
severed frog’s legs jump when stimulated by his galvanic cells, the
first electrical batteries. This seeming connection between the
world of the dead and living through electricity had the potential
to actually explain the essence of life itself, or so it seemed, and
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was the extrapolation of that idea to

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the ultimate human effort to rob the gods of their supernatural
status.
From these early glimpses of fleeting electrical phenomena
proceeded, in the course of just a few decades, a fully elaborated
theory of the nature of electromagnetism itself, and saw the
production and dissemination of one of its first applications, the
telegraph, that at once virtually obliterated time and space in the
delivery of information, perhaps the most significant bottleneck
throughout human history for the patterns and cohesions (and
their opposites) of cultures. And now, only a few years later, the
generation and distribution of electricity would be able to
completely remake the pattern of virtually every human activity.
With the advent of windmills and watermills the metaphor
of useful work began, piecemeal, to change from what one could
accomplish by the application of musclepower, whether human or
draft animal, to things one could get nature to do virtually for free.
Free, that is, once one had accumulated the necessary capital and
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expertise to build a mill, and secure the rights for the land usage.
The steam engine, originally built as a stationary power source to
pump water out of coalmines and later as a source for factory and
motive power, allowed one to place that source of power nearly
anywhere, regardless of prevailing wind patterns or flowing water.
But even the steam engine hardly provided the illusion of limitless
power, of the harnessing of mystical force. And no other branch of
scientific inquiry had so quickly and effectively made the transition
from mystery, to theory, to elegant mathematical description that
permitted the engineer or technician to produce a design on paper
and have it work in reality.
The workings of a steam engine, while in later incarnations
intricate and subject to high-level mathematical analysis, was still a
fairly apparent (and transparent) technology. The operating
principles could be made sensible to anyone in a few minutes.
Electricity was not nearly so obvious, and the actions it produced,
whether mechanical work in a factory, lighting, motive power, or
transporting our very presences anywhere at the speed of light,
were the miraculous equals or superiors to most any display of the

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supernatural invoked by the shaman, priest, or wizard in the most
fantastic of legends. What is more, whereas the success of the
wielder of mystical power of legend required that he be chosen
and personally worthy in some way, as well as deferential to an
authority beyond this world, the miracles of electricity could be
produced at will, by anyone with a few years training, and used
with equal effect and reliability by saint and sinner alike.
What, indeed, would human events become when our daily
lives were suffused with the application of forces and effects not
just made easier through this technology, but out of the realm of
human experience without these forces, and when no more
attention was needed while performing these feats than turning on
a switch, turning an ignition key, or logging on to a computer? In
fact, what is the nature of human consciousness when these
miracles have become so mundane that we are often thinking of
something else entirely while setting in motion causes and effects
that a very few generations ago would have been beyond belief and
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comprehension, what then do we make of the world and ourselves?
What religion, what attachment to sacraments and rituals could
possibly survive intact, maintaining its historical ability to inspire
awe in the infinite, and humility in our own weaknesses, when faced
with a continual onslaught of miracles of our own design?
Electricity, as the scientists and engineers have always
known, as a useful source of power is not actually free, either. At
some remove there always has to be some other cause, whether
wind, water, fossil fuel, or the sun. But this is not at all how it
appears to the end user, and it is this appearance which makes every
bit of difference in the electrical age becoming a metaphor, a
generator not just of power for productive use, but a generator of
the very idea for how the world is and how we live in it; indeed, as
the apotheosis of the engineering approach to all human
enterprise. Though my words are not the same as Henry Adams’,
and I have the benefit of a century’s worth of hindsight, I think
that this gives flavor to Adams’ vision while contemplating the
dynamo. It was nothing less than adumbrations of the powers that

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contemporary society takes for granted, which broke Adams’
historical neck.
It is this engineering ethic, the method of multiplying
layers of observations and rational technique, first evoked by
Francis Bacon three hundred years earlier, that suffused nearly
every sort of response to the centrifugal society that was turn-of-
the-century America. The tacit postulate was that not just an
accumulation of data, but the heuristic process of winnowing out
spurious results, would necessarily and asymptotically approach
“Truth.” Thus, taking cue from the example of the applied physical
sciences, began the grand era of the social sciences in academia,
and in the world of government and social engineering, the
proliferation of specialty bureaucracies of every imaginable kind,
including the regular convocation of blue-ribbon panels of
experts.
It is also intriguing to note that this era saw the virtual
invention of behaviorist psychology. From the late nineteenth

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century until about WWII there were two major branches of
psychology that prospered in the American research university as
proper academic (not medical or therapy-based) disciplines. The
older strain consisted of those scholars whose focus was the
interior self, those who tried to fathom the nature of consciousness.
Their approach and writings are often lyrical and even literary, and
their arguments hinged as much upon the beauty of their rhetorics
as anything else. The young Turks, at first publishing in the same
journals, were the behaviorists, most notably John B. Watson and
later B.F. Skinner. They were not only skeptical of interior states,
but considered it absolutely foolhardy to talk about them. There
was no way to get DATA on interior states, and so a researcher
couldn’t DO anything about it or with it.
At first it seemed that it was out of respect for the
recognition of this default of test-and-measure in cognitive realms,
that the behaviorists decided to examine exterior response only,
rather than interior states, and so behaviorist psychology (in areas
like reflex response experiments), began looking more and more
like physiology, which was already a well-established discipline

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with research money available. But if the divergence of these two
disciplines began by one side simply throwing up its hands and
saying, “all well and good for consciousness, but we can’t measure
it,” the sheer volume of data-gathering and a cultural valuation of
the engineering ethic soon turned ambivalence into certainty. Since
you can’t measure consciousness, it doesn’t exist. Consciousness
studies virtually disappeared from professional journals by 1940.
And in comparison to the genteel academic consciousness
psychologists, the European revolutionaries including Freud,
Adler, and Jung, appeared further beyond the pale of consideration
for the American behaviorists. Such imaginal studies dealt only
with humans, and its theories seemed as vaporous as the dreams
and metaphors upon which they were constructed. The
behaviorists, on the other hand, could read the book of nature in
any organism, by provoking it and observing external behavior,
and then by cataloguing these results and looking for patterns
subjectable to statistical analysis.

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By studying which stimuli provoke which responses in an
organism, from a paramecium to a human, you haven’t merely
explained what is available for observation, you have said
everything there is to say! Everything seemed so gloriously
manageable, if we simply had enough data. Watson went on to
study the behavior of infants, and held considerable sway in the
popular culture with ideas like the toxicity of touching. Children,
according to Watson, should not be touched too much as this is bad
for their development. But, if benighted parents needed (for their
own sentimental illusions) to be in physical contact with their
offspring, then he allowed that perhaps a light, glancing kiss before
bedtime would not do too much harm. [Watson lost his
professorship at Johns Hopkins in 1920, following the revelation
that he was having an affair with one of his graduate students. He
went on to make a name and fortune for himself on Madison
Avenue, in the emerging profession of advertising.]
B.F. Skinner was inspired by the work of Watson and Ivan
Pavlov to become a behavioral psychologist himself, and was not
abashed to move from his animal studies to the human realm. In

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the 1940s he developed what might be seen as an engineering
follow-on to Watson’s theories for ideal environments for infant
and child development. His “Air-Crib” was to isolate the infant
from every sort of “harmful” influence (germs, sound,
inconstancies of temperature) to serve as a mechanical interface
and supplier of an infant’s needs until, perhaps, age two.
It is in this context, when nearly every opportunity seemed
to find its hopeful expression and nearly every problem its solution
in the application of what I have called the engineering ethic, that
it does not appear at all remarkable that the approach of technique
born of empiricism would find its way into the realm of personal
success and fulfillment. In part this is because the individual still
had to make his or her way through life in a world dominated by
rational control, material efficiency, and the engineering ethic.
With so many techniques to manage the capriciousness of lived
experience, whether for an entire society or an individual, what was
one to make of one’s own life and meaning? In an age of

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interchangeable parts, how did you know how well you were doing
in your personal project of living your life?
Between the 1880s and the 1940s the number of
professions had proliferated and saturated our culture. The United
States and the rest of the west had moved from the scholastic
model of the Middle Ages, where the only three recognized
professions, for which university education was requisite, were the
law, clergy, and medicine. By the mid-nineteenth century the first
branch of engineering to become a profession with a degree was
civil engineering, proceeding from the French model of military
engineering and growing with the building of the railroads. Other
engineering professions, such as mechanical, electrical, and
chemical, would arrive by the turn of the century. Many expert
trades that followed the genteel pattern of family association and
apprenticeship gave way to a (perhaps) more democratic degree
certification. The vast majority of workers at the turn of the
century were still comprised of farmers and unskilled laborers, but
that was changing rapidly.

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At the same time, as many cultural historians have
documented, the intricacies of consumerism hierarchies was well
under way. By the time Alfred Sloan of General Motors defined
the annual model change and the de-facto status ranking of the
different makes within the G.M. Line, the culture was left with
several ways to announce their personal success to their fellow
citizens: professional position; income; and the brands of goods
they owned. Since personal success itself was now a commodity
with outward signatures, it stands to reason that, just as Taylor
and the Gilbreths found a market for industrial consultancy, others
would find a market for personal success consultancy.
There was a lot of preaching from various pulpits, religious
and otherwise, about success in the secular rather than spiritual
realms. But the single name we associate with separating such
consultancy out as a professional calling was Dale Carnegie. He
began with courses and books on public speaking (e.g. Public
Speaking and Influencing Men in Business), but found the full power of
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this message in his huge best seller of 1936, How to Win Friends
and Influence People. Whereas Fredrick Taylor’s Principles of
Scientific Management seems a bit dated by today’s readers, feeling
as Charlie Chaplin’s hapless factory worker in “Modern Times”
that people are certainly more than labor-saving machines to be
routinized and maximized, Carnegie’s book doesn’t seem so out of
date at all. Granted, the language is a little antiquarian and sexist
for current taste, but if you just update his lexicon it would fit very
comfortably among the volumes of today’s business advisement
and professional self-help books. Over sixty years later it appears
that the hugely profitable publishing enterprise for every aspect of
how to “get ahead,” are little more than variations on the themes
set down by a genuine American Horatio Alger: Dale Carnegie. It
is very difficult to find anything new in the endless parade of new
books that wasn’t already said by Carnegie.
The key for publishing success seems simply to coin a new
phrase for some supposedly original technique. Make your co-
workers feel that they are important. Make them stakeholders.
Show appreciation. Make a good idea seem like it is the idea of the
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person you are working with/for. Give others credit. Ask probing
questions that incorporate the solution you have already imagined,
and let others “discover” it. Avoid negative people. Convene team
efforts if possible. Look the other person in the eye. Make
customer satisfaction your number one product. Even the
supposedly late twentieth century cutting edge wisdoms, such as
“market yourself,” or “you have to see your professional future as
the management of YOU, Inc.” seem like so much jitterbugging to
the same old music.
As we’ve seen, behaviorism came to define the world of the
mind as only the world of the physical brain and nervous system.
That is, eventually by shear weight of journal articles and grant
money to say that stimulus-response was not merely the only thing
available to empirical measurement, it was the only thing that
WAS. Similarly, the confluence of the engineering approach to
nearly every area of human enterprise, along with the rise of
professions and a well-delineated and universally-understood

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language of consumerist status made it very difficult for anyone to
make a case for other realities or methods in measuring the quality
of a life. Success meant achieving prestige and its outward
signatures. Failure was the absence of those things, and the
personal advice business existed to help make the individual a
success. The outward signs amounted to the thing itself. If your
subordinates, your superiors, or you yourself manifested the
outwards signs of success, signs that you were satisfied, then they
and you were successful and satisfied. Anyone could engineer
success and satisfaction if they just had the data and skill. Even V.
I. Lenin considered himself, foremost, a great engineer and
scientist, and he had an especial admiration for Henry Ford, who
saw himself as both an industrial and social engineer.
Now, I need to make some admissions at this point. Avarice,
pride, social standing, and every sort of asserting one’s personal
ego above others were not invented in the U.S., or in the early
twentieth century. Every one of these human tendencies is

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described and, within the spiritual traditions, inveighed against
from every culture where we have records. We also have help in
how to avoid these predispositions in every one of the great
wisdom traditions, whether the Upanishads, the Tao te Ching, the
Koran, or the Bible, as well as from the great philosophers of
antiquity. Manipulation of others is nothing new, and Machiavelli
did a fair job of codifying technique in this area.
Then what is significantly distinct about this period of
history we’ve been discussing? It seems reasonable to say that one
truism we can make about the early twentieth century American
experience is that the “facts on the ground” we have been
discussing had dominated the physical and cultural landscape to
such an extent that this change in quantity constituted an
undeniable change in quality. Or, as Stalin once said in reference to
the Russian machineries of war that were seen as technologically
inferior by other nations, “quantity has a quality all its own.” When
the everyday lives of nearly an entire society are saturated with

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change, with new ways of making livings and defining who they
were, with new techniques and technologies for spreading the
gospel of consumerism and the fitness of the engineering ethic for
both understanding what is and modifying it, then it is possible for
a broad-based sea change in what a culture values for all its citizens
and how to achieve it.
And if the accumulation of so much technique among so
many millions set their minds about understanding and using so
much arcana, it also left little room in the individual and collective
psyche for a grace so simple, so bereft of technique, as gratitude.
As a fundamental quality which takes one outside of oneself, and
completely beyond the realm of cause and effect and technique, one
might conclude that it is difficult, if not impossible for our
attention to be absorbed by pure gratitude while engaged in nearly
anything that makes up the context of our everyday lives. Nearly
every aspect of our busy-ness is primarily about intensifying our
heuristic techniques to correct and recorrect our actions and the
actions of others to keep our enterprises, our businesses, schools,

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industries, health care, let alone our homes, children, and financial
independence from flying apart.

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Chapter 3: Beyond Childhood: cultivating an even deeper
gratitude
Most often we succeed in holding the many different
responsibilities of adult life together. And that is, we usually
conclude, accounted to good work on our parts. We have studied
hard, either formally or through hard knocks, to get a bead on the
way things work, and then have applied ourselves to it. It is we
who have succeeded, by dint of smarts and sweat, when things
don’t break down. We deserve a pat on the back and a few days
vacation, if anything. Not much to be grateful for there, but a
surreptitious knock-on-wood might be in order. Our vigilance also
primes us to pay attention not so much to when things go right, as
to beware that they might not. Our very bodies are usually
performing unimaginably intricate and subtle dances that amount
to health. Only a fool (or a visionary) would spend much time
walking about in amazement and gratitude that while commuting,

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paying bills, or eating breakfast, once again, her body is doing
everything it needs to for her to exist. Yet, even more incredible, in
the overall scheme of things, is the fact that we can be conscious of
it. If it required our detailed knowledge of how all those systems
worked and for us to plan, and intellectually see to all their
essential modulations and conversations our bodies perform to take
our next breath, we would at once freeze up and die.
I fear that in the last chapter I might also be understood as
announcing that I had found the enemy to gratitude and deep
awareness, and it is the “engineers,” however we describe them.
Whenever I find myself in this territory with students it is easy
and natural for them to take me as an anti-modernist, a machine-
breaker, a Luddite. The above pages can easily be read as a prelude
for some screed against science and technology, and a call for a
return to some earlier epoch when humans were somehow better
off, if not just innately better. And that is not at all the case. Just as
a personal note, I am fascinated by technological devices and

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always have been. Even as a very young child, without any
prompting or even parental role models, I found gadgets, and
electrical gadgets especially, to be the most interesting and
compelling things I could get my hands on. As some children
might collect seashells or stamps, by the time I was eight I had a
cardboard box of electrical devices, mostly motors, that I would
pry loose from a toy or a discarded appliance. One of my hobbies,
to this day, consists of going into my little shop and fashioning an
electronic circuit for the sheer contemplative joy of it, none of
them built to do anything practical (my favorite was a hoax UFO).
In the engineering ethic as I have described it above, that is
the accumulation of disembodied data to be applied for the control
of any process or activity, the epitome of the “engineer” might be
more the realm of the political economist or industrial
psychologist. The individual who delights in creating devices of
any sort might find more kindred association with the
craftspersons of any time or culture.

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elsewhere)
Secondly, it might be presumed that I am saying that what
is wrong with the machine age and the post-industrial, or
information society would not have had such deleterious effects if
we had just known a little more, if we just could have managed to
understand the human spiritual needs a little earlier, if we just had
a better grasp on our place in the natural world and had been able
to blunt our greed with a lighter footprint on the planet’s ecology.
I am not saying this either, but the reasons are a little more
nuanced and I ask the reader’s indulgence in seeing it through.
It is always enjoyable and tempting to engage in “what if ”
thought experiments. Everyone who creates anything—whether
music, poetry, buildings, a new recipe, the inauguration of a new
relationship—is involved in a continuous interweaving of “what if ”
trials and results. It was the entertaining of a great “what if ”
thought experiment that led Albert Einstein to his theory of
special relativity. Asking “what if ” requires that we hold thoughts
about things apart from the fixed reality before us, and it requires
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that we be able to comprehend something of time itself, especially
projection into the future. In other words, such thinking is
profoundly human. Historians, however, have always made strong
warnings of making projections into the future from the past. The
reason one studies history, the former Librarian of Congress
Daniel Boorstin once said, is not so much to infer practical policies
for the present, as it is simply to better understand the human
experience. The study of history, as the study of art, music, or
paleontology, is its own reward and justification.
For the authors of fantasy or science fiction, written or
cinematic, there is no need for such restraint. Time travel, or travel
through space to a parallel universe, are among the most popular
conceits in the genre upon which one can create a truly engaging
plot in which the characters can struggle and reveal their flaws,
powers, and charms. What if you traveled back to the age of
dinosaurs and inadvertently stepped on a single butterfly, would
Truman have lost the election, would language be the same, would
humans have evolved at all? It is great fun as an exercise of
imagination, but outside of that we can’t simply play at histories.

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It is not simply that the true dynamics of the human
condition as it works out its physical and metaphysical realities are
not programmable for their complexities and variables that
cautions against taking liberties with alternate histories. And it is
also not merely because anything we might impose on actual
historical episodes must of necessity lack the richness and thick
description of what actually occurred in all its varieties of
perception for the individuals and communities involved. There is
also a moral caveat here. To seriously consider that periods of time
would necessarily have been better, more right, for civilization is to
engage in the most spiritless form of the engineering ethic. Such
positions devalue the very dignity of human existence.
At its very core, an attitude that continually sees only the
errors in the past and present is the historical equivalent of only
taking note of our physical bodies when they break down. There is
no sense of the wonder of process itself. Beauty and goodness are
simply the evasion of the distasteful and the suppression of the

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bad. There is no point to gratitude since the point of life amounts
to little more than dodging bullets. In short, for those
technologists of culture, life, writ large, is little more than the
concatenation of individual lives in succession. Put another way,
there really isn’t any point at all.
Would anyone seriously propose that the only point of
infancy is to survive to childhood, and the only point of childhood
is to survive to become an adult, to produce another infant while
the parent shuffles toward death? Actually, as I write this I am
knowingly rebuking the mainstream of reductionist-determinist
thought that has held sway in the academies of the west for several
centuries now. Perhaps I simply stated the proposition too baldly,
some might say, and in so doing made a burlesque of responsible
scholarship. But the picture boils down to something very much
like that no matter how much you dress up the picture-frame. The
purely analytic eye, the philosophers of flatland, banishing
gratitude as just another affect that can be completely described
and recreated with the right electro-chemical tweaking of the
brain, would be forced to admit, if they were true to their own

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postulates, that we really are pretty much like butterflies. Basically,
our lot is to arise from the union of gametes, grow to adulthood,
make copies of ourselves, and die. The only real difference,
ultimately, is that so far as we know we leave more complicated
fossils than do insects, including language and changing
techniques. I have seriously tried at times in my life to entertain the
idea of pure mechanism, however much we gussy it all up with
newer mechanisms like complexity theory and indeterminacy. And
I must confess, it just doesn’t work for me. I can talk that talk...but
I feel like a clever liar when I do so, like a covert agent trying to
pass myself off as something I am not.
Another personal disclosure: earlier in my life I held fast to
religious dogma. It became more and more difficult to maintain
such a strict catechisms of literal interpretations of the nature of
God, human history, and destiny. As I learned more, both
academically and personally, it became increasingly difficult to
come up with what have been called “harmonies,” in attempting to

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justify dogma with what I knew not just as disembodied facts, but
as felt truths. When confronted with conflicting accounts of
episodes and guidelines for life, there comes a time for everyone
when they must take what they have learned and what they have
experienced, and then contemplate their conjunctions and look for
resonances. When I came to the point in my own life when the
greatest intellectual attempts to rescue my dogma-infused belief
system resulted in dissonance, and the most profound sense that to
continue to mend the fabric of religious doctrine was dishonest on
my part, then I had to abandon my attempts to resuscitate the
corpse. I could not pretend to gain sustenance from the same
ceremonies, from merely doing the outward performances and
hoping to segregate my consciousness into times when I would be
a responsible academician, and times when I would suspend my
disbelief to hope to be nourished from my religion. Some may be
able to live that way. I wasn’t. And the pain of pretending to things
I did not believe was greater than the pain of the other path: free
fall in an existential void, and losing my story of meaning.

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Occam’s razor (the disposition that, given the choice
between two explanations for any reality, one is constrained to
embrace the simpler and more elegant) slit my spiritual wrists, and
the result felt like the evaporation of my soul. But I was
determined to ride it out as best I could, and not simply wrap
myself in another script to staunch the flow. I decided that it was
highly possible that I would never again locate certainty in
meaning and purpose, and that being the case I would simply do
my best to live, each step of the way, by whatever I most genuinely
felt was right.
It was sort of the converse of Pascal’s bet. Blaise Pascal,
the pious mathematical genius, realized that he could not say for
certain whether his Christian beliefs, including the prospect of
salvation or damnation in the afterlife, were based in reality. At
least they were not rationally provable to others. So he made a
simple decision tree out of this conundrum. If he lived his life as a

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libertine and it turned out there was no hell, then he could have the
advantage of indulging in worldly pleasure with no penalty. On the
other hand, if he lived circumspectly and there were, in fact, a
heaven or hell waiting, he would have reaped eternal reward. The
other possibilities were living as a libertine and finding himself in
hell, or living piously to find that there was no reward. It is a fairly
simple decision tree for a logical mind. The most a life of
indulgence could guarantee was material reward during a fairly
short mortality, and the worst was eternal damnation. He decided,
as a sort of spiritual-actuarial bet, it was best to live the pious life.
I had always thought Pascal’s wager to be sort of the
ultimate joke on centuries worth of clergy threatening their
congregations with hellfire for their wicked ways. My own
decisions for how to proceed with my life didn’t provoke much
levity in me, even though I have a tendency to see something
delightfully absurd in almost anything. I decided that I simply
could not live by stories and precepts that I could not bring myself
to believe any more. I decided that if there were a spiritual fabric in
the cosmos, whatever that may be, that lying to myself had to be
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contrary to it. If I were part of that very fabric, a product of it,
then apprehending that spiritual reality could not come from a
state of war with not just my intellect, but my heart and instincts.
My wager was of a different sort than Pascal’s. In fact, it
wasn’t really a wager at all; I simply proceeded as I felt I had to
proceed. I wasn’t worried so much about getting locked out of
heaven or thrust down to hell as I was of getting locked out of my
own heart. And so I decided that I would have to come to peace
with not having ultimate answers. At very least, if any came to me
they would arrive not because I forced the issue, but in their own
time. Meanwhile, I wished to act as best I could so that, regardless
of any ultimate realities, I would not be left with regret or anguish.
I just wished that the sum total of my intentions and actions might
be the expressions of my best wisdom, at whatever stage in my
maturity I found myself at the time. That is all easier said than
done, but simply saying that much, and writing it to myself, helped
me to pick up and go on.

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These were painful days, to be sure. But gradually a
different sense began to emerge. I was teaching high school at the
time, and I found myself experiencing gratitude in new, more
freeing ways. If I didn’t have the ultimate global map to guide me,
at least I had a sketch of the neighborhood. I realized how
fortunate I was to be able to fill my days with work that felt right,
that had immediate spiritual and emotional return every day. That
isn’t to say I never got exasperated, or was always the model of
grace and decorum. However, there was an overarching sense that
I could take joy in what I was doing, and a fairly secure sense that I
would never look back on my work as a waste of time. I felt real
gratitude in this, and that gratitude was of a more mature, more
lasting and less grasping kind than any I had previously
experienced.
It was over the course of years, not days or months, that
this awareness of gratitude, for life itself and for the opportunity
to be a creative agent, gave me a new operating vocabulary. My life

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began to feel full and flowing. This opened me up to conversations,
internal and external, which spoke of a transcendent reality to life.
I cannot detail precisely every event, every reflection, every
inspiration to locate some precise turning point. Even to go back to
my journals to try to recover that would prove futile because it
wasn’t so much an event as an unfolding process. This process was
every bit as real as any other lived experience. It became obvious,
but never a mundane fact, that we are engaged in a profound
unfolding, that life is full of meaning, and that awareness quite
naturally produces gratitude. Gratitude itself seems to be both
beginning and consummation, cause and effect, in conversing with
matters of the spirit. Gratitude is the very language of that
conversation.
If living with and through gratitude is so rewarding, then
why do we so often default to the niggling conversations of
flatland? I don’t know for sure. I can only make guesses. Perhaps
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there is more depth to our existence than the purely empirical is
tantamount to admitting that we cannot control everything, even
in the ultimate abstract where we had all possible data. Perhaps
what is threatening about such an assumption is that it looks like
uncertainty, even chaos. Maybe it is too much for our constructed
egos: it unhinges the authority of the expert, and for the rest of us
who have been trained to respect the authority of expertise it
leaves us adrift.
Just maybe we don’t have the courage to put the realm of
the spirit to the test! We would just as soon not have the private
corners of our hopes--that life really does have transcendent
meaning--explored, by ourselves or anyone else. Let the
technicians and scholars have their realm, and let us keep that
separate from our spiritual paths. That way, whatever empirical
inquiry can tell us we can always just, quietly and privately, move
the boundaries of our need to have some hint of mystery in the
cosmos accordingly. And perhaps we fear that ultimately
everything WILL be explained in physical-empirical terms, and

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that the explanation alone is tantamount to a dagger in the heart of
spirit.
“The flush of romantic love is only a torrent of
neurotransmitters in the brain you say? Okay, we might not like it,
but we can accommodate it somehow. It is possible to clone sheep,
monkeys, and mice? Well, okay. I’d still like to think there is
something beyond mere manipulation, thank you very much, but I
won’t tell you what it is yet. After all, I may not be a genetic
engineer, but no one is going to make a fool of me!” But the real
threat to the life of the spirit, of gratitude, transcendence, and
purpose is not knowledge itself. It is the fatal mistake of confusing
knowledge of how things work in flatland with the authority to
insist that flatland is all there is.
I have heard so many jeremiads about American education:
the system, the curriculum, the students. (And yes, I have at times
indulged in such headshaking myself.) My goodness, what have
these students been doing for the previous twelve years? They
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can’t distinguish between a well-reasoned argument and pandering
propaganda! They don’t know anything about history, literature,
and worst of all science. They can’t distinguish between a
continental shelf and a galaxy. And on and on. I think these
academic concepts and intellectual skills are important, indeed, but
my sense of the difference between knowing them or not, for the
individual or a culture, seems quite distinct from many who have
chosen to take up the banner of “learn or become extinct.” I wish
my students to know these things for much the same reason that
Daniel Boorstin gave for studying history: it is rich, it is wonderful,
and the more ways you stretch your mind in a community of
learning, the more you will be able to explore, including things
that neither student nor teacher can imagine yet. But the anger and
disgust that sometimes infects cultural critics, insisting that the
whole canon must first be mastered (memorized, if necessary)
before one is deemed worthy to pronounce something worthy, and
only then to extend the boundaries of human understanding, is
deadly.
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I don’t wish to pursue this too far at this point, for I will
take this up later in a more satisfying way. I simply want to address
our proclivities for banishing the transcendent, especially from our
formal curricula where our children spend so much time ostensibly
in training for adulthood. There is an implicit irony in the academy,
which seems to be continually ignored, perhaps deliberately in the
service of (to paraphrase Pierre Duhem) saving the phenomenon,
where the phenomenon is the authority of experts. In our plans for
general education we have precious room for direct experience.
We expect our undergraduates to know some fundamental
things in order for us to certify them as appropriately educated and
prepared for participation in adult society. Let me just take a simple
example. Most colleges require that students complete a patchwork
quilt of courses we call general education. A course in descriptive
astronomy is a frequent offering. We would like them to get at least
some basics from such a course, such as the workings of stars, our
evidence for our most current cosmologies, and some scale and
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scope for distances, ages, and the number of celestial bodies. We
tend to use textbooks, slides, websites, and lectures to make these
concepts coherent. A fortunate class might actually be able to look
through a telescope once in the semester, but that often isn’t
considered necessary.
How do we know there are rings around some planets, and
moons other than our own? Well, people from the time of Galileo
have seen them through a telescope. Do we even bother to
remember, first of all, what an absolutely stunning watershed it
was to look through a telescope, an instrument that was not a part
of our own eyes, and believe that what we saw through that
artificial device was to be believed? Do we even mention that what
we refer to as the Scientific Revolution was every bit as much a
revolution in perception as it was in the gathering of data and the
formulation of theories? The use of instrumentation, whether the
telescope or microscope, the air pump or barometer, the
electroscope or the galvanometer, all of these required us to trust
in an artificially constructed intermediary to tell us things that we

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could not apprehend without them. And we BELIEVED them!
That is revolutionary.
Some instruments, we might say, just amplified our natural
senses. But many of these early devices (and most of what we use
for research today) are not simply amplifiers, but they are actually
translating one kind of evidence into a completely different kind of
evidence, and we took this display to our senses and their
interpretations as reality! Now that is something quite stupendous
in the history of human thought. If we cannot impart some sense
of just how revolutionary this is, how can we hope to impart any
sense of romance and mystery and, yes, gratitude in all this
information? And yet we consider our students somehow deficient,
somehow dulled to learning, if they don’t remember any of these
facts after the final exam, which is usually the case.
It so happens that many years ago I bought a homemade
telescope for about ten dollars (at a garage sale) and although it
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adjustment, one night I was able to actually see the rings around
Saturn. The mount consisted of a brass pipe fitted to the barrel of
the telescope and there was no clock drive to keep up with the
earth’s rotation. And I really didn’t know what I was doing. But by
trying a couple of different eyepieces, and trying my best to keep
from shivering, I was able to see those rings that before I had only
seen in books. I was ecstatic, and I had to run inside and get the
rest of my family out in the driveway to see it. I made an important
discovery that night: that I could see this magnificent spectacle,
invisible to the unaided eye, for myself. And yet we expect our
students to become driven simply by our second, and often third-
hand interpretations and recitations of what is.
Compare this to the great spiritual wisdom traditions.
Every one of those paths to enlightenment began as an invitation
to primary experience. It is only after some of these traditions
became so overlarded with dogma, with prescriptions and
proscriptions, and with a meticulously articulated human chain of
authority that the experience of a religion could devolve into
outward performance and the mastery of rules. But every

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tradition, east or west, began as direct experience of the “other,” of
the transcendent. Primary experience within these traditions still
exists, though such seekers are often relegated to the margins
compared to the organization of large numbers of adherents
within identifiable and allowable boundaries. But the origins are
found in mystical experience. It wasn’t just a neat idea if you could
experience transcendental conversation yourself. You really
weren’t getting what it was all about unless you yourself had some
primary experiential involvement. By comparison with the
evacuated received knowledge we expect our students to embrace,
the spiritual experiment seems downright enlightened!
Well, the proper academic authority might say, pitying my
lack of sophistication, everything that we teach our students
COULD be verified if they had the time and patience, and some of
them will enter graduate studies in areas of expertise where they
will experience these data firsthand. But there is so much to learn
that you must be reasonable. There is so much these students have

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to cover, and it is an inescapable factor in this age of the explosion
of knowledge that for a lot of what they are taught they must
trust that there are, in fact, legions of people who do know these
evidences first hand. The scientific method may be based upon
observation, test, and variation, but it is enough that they know
that these things have already been done and agreed upon in the
professional court of reason.
I think the clerics who presided over the Inquisition might
have been able to front a defense not very much different. All right,
then, we don’t kill and torture people for being heterodox; that
would be so “unenlightened.” We just dismiss them. Go ahead on
your metaphysical questing. See if I care. How do you plan to
prove to me that you have got hold of something real? That is, how
can you prove something upsetting to the worldview I am already
invested in?
And of course, since the parameters for proof are already
defined as residing completely in flatland, there is no hope to prove
anything. The reality is of a different nature from the limitations

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already set. And to further make the case of its futility, the
properly trained critic could heap up plenty of flatland evidence of
his own. Bring us your best mystic, your best visionary, your best
spiritual exemplar. Now, you say you are able to actually access an
apprehension of reality not simply physical, go ahead. All right,
now, you are properly entranced and we have a real-time PET scan
going on your brain right now. See there? Your synapses are
showing increased energy usage in this region, and over here.
We’ve seen that before. It happens when people hallucinate, it is
very well documented. So, that solves that. Your so-called esoteric
experience is no more than an activation of certain parts of your
brain, and we call that hallucination, and that of course means
delusion! Well, that’s all it is then. Hope we didn’t shatter your
metaphysics too violently.
This may sound far too facile for the kind of restraint we
like to think we use in discussions within civil society. But this is
not a straw man I’ve set up. I have seen explanations very much
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like this to supposedly disassemble “nonsense notions,” so we can
get back to serious issues. And yet even flatland itself keeps
offering us intimations of the numinous, the sublime, the more
profound meaning to life. But to argue for Spaceland when
constrained to use the vocabulary of flatland forces one to use
analogy. For example, it is not a very great stretch of the
imagination to allow that our techniques for functional brain scans
might some day soon allow us to track the time-variations of
response of every neuron through some massively parallel
computing machine. If not every neuron, then perhaps we could
get the resolution so fine that we are satisfied that the recording of
activity in microscopic groups of neurons is a very close
approximation of brain process. Now, take a person so monitored
and blindfold him. Now, whack him on the thumb with a hammer
and watch the electrical storm that ensues. If our mapping were
accurate enough, and our means of stimulation discrete enough, it
is possible to imagine the same subject sitting there wired up and
blindfolded, but now we will simply playback and transmit the
neural patterns that the brain itself generated when he got his
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thumb whacked. Remember, this is a thought experiment, so don’t
worry too much just now about the current state of electronic
sensors and transducers. At least in theory we would not find it
beyond reason if our poor test subject experienced a whack on the
thumb, even though there wasn’t a hammer in sight. Which
experience was real?
The clever neuroscientist or cyberneticist might see the
lame trap I’ve set and reply, “why, they’re both real. They are both
perfectly valid experiences, and so far as the subject is concerned,
one may not be distinguishable from the other. What have you
proved? Next question.” But that is not the point of this exercise.
The point of this exercise is the following. You have just produced
two very real and (in this thought experiment) indistinguishable
experiences for a person. I deliberately chose the physical
perception of pain because it is free, in its immediacy, of
complicating association, and therefore easier for the
neuroscientist, and the rest of us, to imagine this as a truly possible

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controlled experiment. You have admitted that two radically
different external stimuli, from the perspective of the observer,
produce the same felt experience, and you have satisfied yourself
by saying that the physical state in the brain can be measured and
provoked by either method. What possible justification can one use
to say that if one were able, somehow, to find physiological
correlates to a transcendent experience (so-called by the person
experiencing it) that you have then also absolutely the cause of
that state? “Ah-hah! We see the pattern in the brain. Therefore that
is the beginning and end of it. The correlate IS the generator of
the experience!”
I would reply, “Well, what did you expect? If it is part and
parcel of our mortal existence that we have this intricate body to
mediate and interpret the physical world around us, and someone
reports a change of perception that produces an accompanying
physical and emotional state, wouldn’t you expect to see its traces
in the living brain? That in no way says that those correlates were
not provoked by something else, say the metaphysical analogue of
a hammer blow as opposed to an electrode. Furthermore, you have

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already defined what constitutes evidence, and that is only the
correlations of response in that physical brain.” I do not intend this
little example to constitute anything like proof for the reality of
what I call the things of the spirit. I cannot do that, for that is an
issue of primary experience, which I cannot define in terms
acceptable to the materialist.
What disturbs me is the ferocity with which so many seem
bent on enforcing the same presumptions that fueled the rise of
behaviorism, as discussed in the previous chapter. This disposition,
in its first generation, is a dismissal of everything that cannot be
observed with the instruments at hand because it implied an
inability to control, to intervene, and for the experimenters to be
the sole authors of what is, sooner or later. And it seems, in the
history of ideas, to be a short trip from dismissal of something as
irrelevant to the insistence that it doesn’t matter. And that is, so far
as the intellect is concerned, no different from saying it doesn’t
exist.
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The problem is that Occam’s razor cuts both ways. I can
explain altruism, first in ants and then in humans, as just another
buttress for the Darwinian fortress. Seeming altruistic behavior is
simply another case of random genetic variation and selection. For
certain social species, if they did not develop a differentiation
between workers, soldiers, queens, etc., they simply proved
insufficiently robust at surviving whatever complex of
environmental stresses they were in. When explaining human
altruistic behavior, we are assured that we are not explaining a true
difference in kind but just a further elaboration of that quality.
Gratitude, by extension, can be explained as an autonomic response
that has helped us survive to make the next generation. Sure, we
are allowed to call it genuine if we insist, just so long as genuine
means being true to an acquired trait. Gratitude, from the insistent
catechism that description (or better yet predictable manipulation)
is equivalent to having the thing itself, is just a complicated set of
physical attitudes and expressions (facial or verbal), which, lucky
for us, we developed when we experienced another sentient
creature doing something that helped us. Its expression is

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accompanied by certain surges in hormones and neurochemicals,
which make it pleasurable. And, equally fortunately, seeing that
outward display given to us, we have also evolved a complementary
biological response, which is pleasurable. Furthermore, through
the increased mental ability to project into situations of the future,
extrapolated from the past, we also cultivated the ability to foresee
that certain actions would provoke the whole symbiotic response of
pleasure and, lucky again, would ensure our survival.
So, we would be wise to write on an exam in evolutionary
psychology, even if we tend to think of gratitude as possibly being
emblematic of something much deeper and sublime, that it is really
just so much natural selection, further elaborated by cultural
conditioning, so much accumulation of pleasant sounding poetry,
so much psychological delight in thinking we have found deep
experiential resonances with others of our clan, which serves to
further heighten the mutuality of physical survival. Is there

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something in this line of reasoning which seems, just the slightest
bit, overwrought?
There is always a predisposition to seek explanations within
the dimensionality where we can be the manipulators, if not the
creators. Working only at this level guarantees we will have lots of
company, and the unaided human psyche finds great comfort in the
presence of company, in the assenting nods of those who get our
stories. At very least we will avoid the pain of incomprehensibility
on the part of everyone else, and being declared either foolish or
crazy. (And being perceived as foolish or crazy, by the way, is a
quick ticket to the digestive tract of a saber-toothed tiger, which,
of course, is why we’ve inherited genes that tell us to avoid any
such outward behaviors.) If one is going to argue for a reality that
is not simply within everyday experience, it is much easier to
discuss a lower level of dimensionality than a higher level.
For anyone who has ever had a course in trigonometry
(perhaps with relief that the ordeal is over) you may recall that,
among other things, you were constrained to learn formulas and

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deal with squiggly graphs or abstract entities: the undulating curve
of a sine-wave graph, for instance, that looked like a slinky but
which you had to make some kind of numerical sense of. But there
is a very interesting origin to these mathematical trigonometric
functions. They are also grouped under a single category known as
the circular functions, and while they are wavy, and not straight,
they don’t appear to be very circular. The circular essence of them
is actually not hard to make sensible. Draw a circle on a piece of
paper, and draw cross hairs on top of that circle (X and Y
coordinate axes). Now put a dot on the circumference of the circle.
Imagine this dot to be a marble, tied to a string to a point in the
middle. That string is your radius, and as long as you keep the
string taught, the marble will always be somewhere on the
circle. Now move that marble around the circle at a constant, slow
speed. If you have patience, you can actually make this little model
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Now take your little apparatus into a darkened room. You
may need an extra set or two of hands to do this. Put your little
model on a long, flat, smooth surface, like a dining-room table and
in a darkened room have someone shine a flashlight along that
surface toward the marble. What you will see is an illuminated
surface with the shadow of the marble behind it. Now slide your
apparatus slowly along the table with the flashlight, while you
move the marble around the circle at a constant rate. Again, this is
probably easier with two people. As you move the stuff sideways,
you will see the see the shadow of the marble undulate up and
down, you won’t see the shadow tracing out the circle of what you
perceive to be its true motion, what you get is a sine wave. In fact,
you can put the whole thing on a larger paper affixed to the table,
and have someone move along with you with a magic marker
tracing out the position of the shadow, and low and behold you get
that nice undulating wave whose graph you struggled with many
years ago in the math classroom.
What we have done is a downward translation in
dimensionality. We have taken the obvious two-dimensional

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movement in a circle, and we have isolated just half of that motion.
We have said, well, while this marble moves around a circle, how
does it move if we just look at it from one side? If we all lived in
one-dimensional space, in “Lineland” these would be the only kind
of motions we could make. For the inhabitants of Edwin Abbott’s
“Flatland,” there are correlates to events that happen in
“Spaceland.” In the case of Mr. A. Square, he happened to be the
only one to see the sphere on his mission of enlightenment as he
passed through flatland. And what A. Square saw as Sphere passed
through his plane of existence, flatland, was first a dot, then a
small circle which gradually enlarged until it reached a maximum
size, and the proceeded to shrink until it again became a dot and
then disappeared altogether.
A. Square was stunned, and more than a little disturbed.
Like Henry Adams beholding the dynamo, he had seen effects
beyond his vocabulary, and like Adams, he was both terrified and
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Doubtless, the wise elders of flatland, had they observed this event
first hand would have applied the recondite geometry of flatland to
account for what they saw, and thereby to deny its other-
dimensionality. We, as inhabitants of Spaceland, would look at
their complex and tortured logic as merely the description of the
traces left by a projection into two dimensions of what was in
reality a manifestation of three-dimensionality. In this charming
little allegory we are immediately drawn to historical comparisons
with things like the abuse of Galileo’s astronomical findings at the
hands of the authorities of a different worldview, straining to keep
that worldview, and their authority, intact.
In fact, we might marvel at how complex analysis can be
marshaled to hold at bay a much more simple, to us obvious, and
elegant apprehension of the way things are. Certainly, it is the very
toppling of such complex delusionary tactics to deny new
syntheses that is, correctly, the hallmark of the Enlightenment.
Don’t deny complications in your worldview, for they can be the
very fissures through which grand new insights come. But do not
succumb to the grasping of holding your intellectual scaffolding

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together either. Above all, beware of your postulates, and have the
courage to regularly consider what might come to light if they
were different.
It is very easy to cast the intimations I have made for a
spiritual reality and meaning (of a fundamentally different nature
from our accumulations of data and theory, stimulus and response)
as just a reactionary denial of the grandeur that has produced all
areas of inquiry since the Enlightenment in the west. I hope that is
not the impression I have made. As I’ve mentioned before, I believe
that the general disposition known as “antimodernism,” which is
often allied with the assumption that there existed some more
perfect society in the distant past to which we must return is not
only flawed, but psychically dangerous. It sees glory in stasis, and
there is not a shred of evidence in the world that nature itself
values this. Such a disposition denies the dignity of humanity. It
places humanity outside the realms of what ought to be. And such
a fixation on primitivisms, rather than honoring the core nature of

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the early wisdom traditions, places it in a museum. Just as a
fascistic devotion to the stimulus-response explanation of “all that
is” moves its adherent further and further from the heart of
gratitude, so does viewing such an expression of the human
intellect as solely toxic and unnatural prevent us from the truths
that a spirit of gratitude can provide. We become haters of our
natures, and ourselves and that is a stance of anger, not
appreciation.
What I am urging is not denial, but a new tone to our
syntheses of who we are. That tone does not see everything we do
not like in our individual and collective past as a humiliating
mistake or, worse, a grand waste of time. We no longer see the
infant as just an immature and miniature version of an adult,
putting in time until biology delivers a more self-sufficient body,
and education produces a more competent agent. From a larger
canvas we shouldn’t see past cultures as moderns-in-waiting
(which is out of vogue in the academy anyway), nor as strings of
precursors some of whom got things just about right while we are
stranded on the far side of wisdom getting most things wrong.

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Either view is an attempt to make ignorance bliss, when in fact it is
just the absence of wisdom.
We are in the right place and time, if we would just allow
ourselves to be grateful for that. Yes, the tempos and
intransigencies of contemporary societies can seem very toxic
from the view of the evening news. But even our excesses can
provide insights not available to cultures past. As our landscapes
change, our built landscapes, our cultural and imaginal landscapes,
our scientific and ideational landscapes, then we, both intellectually
and spiritually, respond. If we have the heart for it we can
understand both who we are and who we may become, with insight
and wisdom previously unavailable. Embrace opportunity. Be
grateful, not afraid or anaesthetized.
It is impossible to consider the connections between artifact
and interpreter if there are no artifacts. What is the difference
between orality and literacy, which inquiry opens up vast and
subtle wonders of the nature of human experience? This question,

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and the insights it produces, cannot be entertained without the
written word, and the differences produced between one individual
reading and writing and the differences in community and purpose,
good or bad, that can arise when the many can participate can only
be considered when the innovation of mass publication (in any
form, books, electronic media, the Internet) are facts on the
ground. Why bemoan the insights of the sciences just to keep
ancient stories from dissolving?
There is essential wisdom in those old stories, but their
details were simply ways of trying to give imaginal footholds into
the realm of the transcendent for hearers who were immersed in
their own flatlands, and even for the visionaries who also had to
find correlates of the other in their own here-and-now. The core
experience of the spiritual would be cast in different stories today,
and the fact is that they ARE being written today as well. But our
psychological reflex is often to flatten out meaning in existence, so
that we all can democratically inhabit the landscape of least
common denominators and not worry that we are “missing out on

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something,” the worry born out of fear that our few decades of
mortality are all
we have and, in the phraseology of the “me generation,” we want
to have it all, and we want it now.
The only sure way out is by primary experience, which
endows us with a new vocabulary available for conversation in the
apprehension of that deeper realm. And, for what it is worth, I feel
that the most elemental quality we can cultivate that opens the
door to the spiritual is gratitude. But this gratitude needs to sing
the song of celebration, and of welcoming the contours of our
paths to wisdom, if we are to be able to see wisdom when we
encounter it. This is a gratitude that thrives on experience. It is a
mature gratitude, not an amnesiac return to ignorance and
innocence.
Some have tried to find the source of gratitude in simplicity
itself. I don’t think this is completely wrong. If gratitude is a

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fundamental quality that lies not just within the constructs of
intellect, then it is sometimes easier, more understandable, to
present it in forms where the details of adult life are absent and
not allowed to confuse the vision. The great philosopher-
theologian C. S. Lewis described a few episodes, both delicate and
overpowering; from his childhood where he is sure he first
experienced something of the transcendent. Or as he put it,
“something quite different from ordinary life and even from
ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, ‘in another
dimension.’” One was a simple recollection of an afternoon with
his brother, and the other two occasions occurred while reading.
He reports this sudden immersion in otherness, in those early
years, as evanescent, unbidden, and a complete surprise leaving him
yearning to recover that sense.
The Benedictine monk, David Steindl-Rast similarly tries to
locate the very edge of the transcendence of gratitude in surprise:
Do we find it difficult to imagine that gratefulness
could ever become our basic attitude toward life? In

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moments of surprise we catch at least a glimpse of the joy
to which gratefulness opens the door. More than that--in
moments of surprise we already have a foot in the door.
There are those who claim not to know gratefulness. But is
there anyone who never knew surprise? Does springtime
not surprise us anew each year, or that expanse of the bay
opening up as we come around the bend of the road. . . .
Things and events that trigger mere catalysts. I started
with rainbows because they do the trick for most of us, but
there are more personal catalysts. We have to find our own,
each one of us. . . . Once we wake up in this way, we can
strive to stay awake. Then we can allow ourselves to
become more and more awakened. (Steindl-Rast)
The playwright Eugene Ionesco seems to concur in his
estimation of the nature of childhood. “The end of childhood is
when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar,
when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.” I
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think what Ionesco describes here is not an essential condition, but
rather makes a poignant observation of what is generally the case.
Most children, if afforded a childhood unencumbered by too much
tragedy, do seem endowed with a capacity for wonder, surprise, and
joy that we, as adults, longingly see as the free air of just so much
innocence, never to be recaptured once we are inured to the
complexities of life. With all respect to this view of the world as it
can so easily be apprehended, I am positing something quite
different. The only proof I can offer is personal experience, with
hope that it will find some resonance of recognition in you, the
reader.
What I am suggesting is that these childhood experiences
of surprise are indeed intimations of the soul and spirit, but they
are just that, fleeting intimations. Furthermore, it is possible to do
more than revisit those memories as an adult, finding brief
episodes of respite from a brutish world. To re-encounter and
cultivate gratitude as an adult, to actually have that disposition as a
natural companion and interpreter of adult life is to inhabit a state
of grace more profound, filled with greater possibility than the

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child’s. Without gratitude life becomes at best a steady ramping up
of worldly stuff, whether position, influence, celebrity, or money.
At worst it becomes imbued with an air of inexorable decline,
physically, emotionally, and (as we become more jaded about the
entropy of our flatland) spiritually.
As I recall the individuals who have most elevated me, I
clearly see in their natures a regular conversation with gratitude.
My very favorite authors, addressing nearly any subject, seem filled
with gratitude, whether they are writing fiction or describing the
latest theories of cosmology or biology. While they may not be
using the word “gratitude” expressly, it feels as though that is the
very motivating force behind their work. In fact, it is that book
itself, or symphony, or selfless affectionate act, which is the very
expression of that gratitude.
To be in the presence of someone whose fundamental
presumption of existence begins and ends with gratitude is
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somewhat confused as to why it is they feel more alive, more aware,
more joy, and a sense that nearly anything is possible when in the
presence of such a person. If they themselves are not yet
conversant with the vitalizing force of gratitude, they sometimes
describe being with such a person in any sort of outward
expression that they can locate to make a projection into flatland. “I
don’t know. She just is enthusiastic about what she does. He really
seems to enjoy being with us. Everybody seems to come up with
more interesting things when she is around. I never laugh so much
as when he is here, I mean, my face hurts afterwards. My
conversations with her are the best I’ve ever had, and I’ve never
had so many ideas to think of before--it almost makes me dizzy.”
That is not to say that gratitude can only be expressed by
hyperactive extroverts, not at all. People also tend to feel peaceful,
part of some deeper connection, more able to see, feel, and reason.
They feel accepted, not just by the other person, but in their own
hearts, and they feel far less defensive and protective of their
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To cultivate gratitude also requires time alone. It needs
time to contemplate the sublime, and to listen. But it doesn’t end
there. The cultivation of a soul of gratitude inevitably yearns to
commune with others, to open imaginations and spirits to
experience the wonder of existence, and to find their own paths
and voices in expressing their own visions. Gratitude is the
language of envisioning, it is food for the soul, and it is the essence
of celebration and hope.

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Part Two — Deep Practice, Synthesis, and

Envisioning
(Thoughts on education and what is
worth doing)
Chapter 4: The Power of

Surrogates
If gratitude is the yearning of the soul to express itself,
and the language of envisioning, what is to prevent us from living
every day with gratitude? Does it take some extraordinary mental
effort? Is the experience of gratitude as a normal state of mind
some esoteric art, available only to only mystics, ascetics, or people
just out of touch with reality? Obviously, I don’t think that is the
case. Still, I realize that there is at least some shadow of truth in
the problems of living in an ordinary, workaday world, having
some difficulty in reconciling the demands placed upon most of us,

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and experiencing gratitude. In fact, there are some extraordinary
contexts we find ourselves in that can make the embrace of
gratitude seem elusive, almost impossible. What I would like to
explore, in the next three chapters, are the conditions and
presumptions of those contexts.
This is a difficult subject for me to write about, primarily
because in order to do it justice, and not leave you, the reader,
dangling with some nice sounding platitudes that have no bearing
on the day to day struggles, I have to fully place myself in those
contexts themselves. I cannot hope to explain these contexts to
anyone’s satisfaction, or hope to come out the other side with some
sort of hope, dignity, and especially vision intact unless I can first
go to places that are contrary to where my heart is, and return
again. This is the realm of surrogates. It is the realm where we
suffer the longings of our true selves, but, for a variety of reasons,
try to satisfy those longings with replacements. These
replacements are not the genuine food we seek, but offer instead
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palliatives to mitigate the longing, and when the efficacy of one
palliative wanes we hope that a new, more potent surrogate will
come into view.
i) Money Changes
I once heard someone say that in a democracy, everyone
should have the right to pursue their desires, and they should also
have the right to an education so that they can have better desires.
Americans today are living in the convergence of extraordinary
desires, with social and cultural trends not simply in contradiction,
but often, to use the geometrical analogies of flatland and
spaceland, on skewed planes. Of course there are the simple
contradictions. At least we can make them simple with a least
common denominator reckoning, and these have always been part
and parcel of democracy. We want more government services, but
we don’t want to raise taxes to do it. This is hardly a new
observation, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if any number of
today’s journalists, pundits, and speechwriters have a single macro

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command on their personal computers for the preceding sentence,
as well as for other shopworn phrases such as, “what the American
people want. . . ," “what we need is less government, not more . . . ,"
“there is a great core of concerns in the country that is not being
addressed inside the beltway . . . " and “people vote with their
pocketbooks.” But just because an utterance is a cliché doesn’t mean
that there isn’t some truth behind it. The very problem with clichés
in talking about anything that matters is that their very repetition,
rather than provoking deep consideration, glazes the eyes of
understanding, reifying the functional conclusions of flatland
rather than giving breathing space for ideas truly beyond the script
of simply “what is.”
When I was in graduate school studying the history of
science I had a colleague whose special interest was twentieth
century research programs. In trying to understand the
significance of scientific innovations he had a simple mantra
“follow the money.” In other words, if you want to understand why

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scientists pursue certain questions or projects, as well as the
sympathies or antipathies of government, academia, or the public
at large there was one investigative tool that would invariably give
you your answers money. In this way of thinking, once you have
the invention of money in a society, you could pretty much deduce
what that society was about by using this marvelous universal
solvent of values and intentions.
Well, I didn’t much like this single blunt instrument as a
way of figuring everything out. The fact that perhaps research
projects might originate with an affection for the inquiry was not
part of my graduate student colleague’s intellectual map. My only
proof of its inadequacy was my personal experience. I had studied
science as an undergraduate because I genuinely loved the subject
(not because I was especially gifted!). In fact, when I finally decided
to change my major to physics, it was with a sort of resignation. I
knew so little about professional realities at that age that I thought
there were only a tiny handful of actual physicists in the world,
and they were sports of nature of such superior ability that some
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universe, sort of like setting up a poet laureate position for science.
I didn’t have any illusions, even at that age, that I would become
one of their number. I only knew of the historical legends in the
field, and I really didn’t know you could make a living at it. And I
remember one day saying to myself, “but I like this; so I don’t care
if I’m going to get a job at it or not, I’m not going to spend time in
college not learning what I want.” I’d worry about an occupation
later.
What surprised me in graduate school, then, was how easily
this particular student could persuade others in the department. It
wasn’t as though nothing else was discussed in seminars, but
whereas other lines of analysis would often provoke discussion,
both strident and subtle, whenever this individual would trot out
some statistic on money available, whether for the Royal Society at
the time of Newton or NASA in the twentieth century, it seemed
to ring with finality for the rest of the class. When I would bring
up the possibility of an aesthetic to the research, or to the

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biographical sources of historical figures to illuminate personal
passions, it was very much like arguing from a different dimension.
The denominators were definitely not in common. What remains
fixed in my consciousness to this day is how little justification one
needs (none, really) to make virtually any analysis of modern
society based upon money. Why is this so, and when did it start?
Clichés do get reified, and metaphors matter. Time is
money, and money talks. Does that mean that time talks? Actually,
I don’t think that is a joke, or a faulty syllogism. I think time talks
very eloquently, and much more to the point than we would like to
admit. What we spend our time doing says more than anything
about what we value. I know what you’re saying. Not another
sermon about work and leisure. Not another self-righteous
preacher trying to make us feel guilty. Or maybe you are ready to
just chalk it up to the chatter of somebody out of touch with real
life Egad, how like a college professor! Okay, I’ll admit to some
degree of all of the above, except for the feeling guilty part. What
I would like to do is some more excavating and exploring, some
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really what I hope is the tone of all the reflections in this book.
In a market economy we are expected to earn a living,
doing something that others think is valuable, and hence they pay
us for it. We get paid, most often, with money. [Apparently, this is
no longer the case in post-Cold War Russia. I have recently read
reports where teachers are being paid in things like coffins,
headstones, and vodka!] It is impossible to overestimate the
significance of the invention of money on civilizations, and
individual life experience. It is very nearly as significant in human
history as the evolution of language itself. In some ways it has
even greater effect than language, although it seems unlikely that
money could have ever been invented without language.
Money, under the right conditions, is instantly translatable
in several ways. Unlike spoken or written language, in a global
economy a standard currency translates across cultures and
societies with very little translation going on at all. Words have

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different meanings, phrases and stories have a history of episodes
and characters and assumptions mixed in, so that even when one
goes through the laborious process of learning another language
you are still not home free. You still can’t truly get the intention of
the speaker without considerable time immersing yourself in the
culture, and still you are bound to trust that your common
humanness will translate much of the felt experience behind what
is being said or written. Even with lots of monetary currencies in
the world, all that is needed to translate currencies is a simple
multiplier the exchange rate.
But there is an even more fundamental way in which money
translates our lives like no other aspect of society. If you were a
hunter-gatherer you “went to work” each day to eat. What you
hunted or gathered is what you and your family ate and used for
shelter. You moved around a lot, but you moved as a clan or tribe.
There isn’t much likelihood that someone else in your group was
going to accumulate a bunch of exotic stuff that others didn’t have
access to as well, so if you wanted some ornament or tool, you
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bartering in a nomadic hunter-gatherer situation. There isn’t much
translation of goods and services necessary. Not much this-for-
that. Or, to quote from Robert DeNiro’s character in The
Deerhunter, (holding up a rifle cartridge to his friend) “This is this,
it’s not something else, this is this!”
With the advent of stationary agrarian culture and
currencies, “this” could indeed become “something else.” A few
specialties arose, such as metallurgy, in which someone could do
something very different from creating food to eat and yet eat very
well. And if all you raised was wheat, it didn’t mean that all you
could eat was Wheatena. I don’t wish to belabor the obvious, but
over the millennia it was money which allowed the translation of
one thing into another, of one set of life efforts into other results.
“How much corn do you want for that stool?” is a transaction that
does have a solution, but only if that particular furniture maker
happens to be in need of corn. It is money which allows for the
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to the modern material world, as well as to the rise of paid
professions which caused an explosion in the number of ways in
which one might, literally “make a living.”
We all know the rest of the free market story. If all things,
food, furniture, advice, gets translated into cash, how do I know if
all the time I spent making this kitchen table is worth the one hour
of therapy I got? Well, that doesn’t need to be figured out in a free
market. Sure, for a short time either the carpenter or the
psychologist might get ripped-off, but sooner or later Adam
Smith’s invisible hand comes in and sets everything to rights.
Adam Smith, you may recall, is considered the seminal thinker in
modern market-based economic theory. He published his best
known work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, in the auspicious year 1776, though Smith was a Scotsman,
not an American.
In a very abbreviated version, Smith’s thesis was that if an
economy were truly free to create and trade goods and services
without the interference of things like governmental regulations

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which clog up commerce and regulate inequities, then people would
act in their own enlightened self-interest. That is, they would try
to make money. They wouldn’t make things other people didn’t
need or want, because they couldn’t sell them in the marketplace.
They wouldn’t price-gouge their customers, because they would be
undersold by a competitor. In short, if everyone could truly act in
their own enlightened self-interest, there might be discontinuities
in the short run (people mistakenly producing the wrong
commodities or at the wrong price), but soon the whole of
economic activity would make it seem as though all the individuals
participating in the market were guided by a sort of “invisible
hand,” that would produce the most good for the most people.
This was a powerful idea, and the most perfect evocation of
the epoch historians call the Enlightenment, which also produced
Isaac Newton. Here we have the clockwork universe applied to the
most unclockwork of realms, the social realm. The magical hand
doesn’t have to be built or invoked; it is just part of the free market

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system, or so the theory goes. In fact, the only thing political
intervention can do is mess things up. The invisible hand was given
the status of a law of nature, like (very much like, in fact) gravity.
You may as well try to pass a law that says that no one should be
subjected to falling down, and then appoint a brigade of gravity
police to catch anyone who may be falling, with the end result
being, of course that everybody would be colliding and falling.
In some ways it was even more elegant than a law of
nature. In the first place it was an incredibly bold venture to try to
find a natural law in the messiness of human affairs. But the theory
was also ahead of its time in another way. This was not simply a
statement of what is, and you can see it in the regular motion of
this pendulum in my laboratory. Smith was positing a heuristic
system. That is, it is self-informing. It may start out a bit
erratically, but there is a feedback loop, namely the market system
itself, which would produce soon maximize efficiency and bring
about good social effects. Furthermore, people would act in each
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interest! This would irrevocably happen. Who needs ethics, moral
codes, or any manner of human improvement sermonizing? If you
were dishonest, disrespectable, or just plain lazy, you would very
soon see the results of your unacceptable behavior right in your
pocketbook.
ii) The Invisible Hand meets the Pastoral Ideal
Adam Smith does present a clean model for economic affairs
which would have a special claim on the hearts and minds of those
caught up in the thrall of the Enlightenment. The model works
well, or at least it is possible to coherently argue the point, within a
society that is large enough to have multiple suppliers of all
essential goods and services, and yet small enough for the parts of
that society to be known to each other. This latter point is often
overlooked, but it is precisely the problem that thinkers like
Thomas Jefferson were passionately concerned with in order to

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avoid the social mess that European industrialization was already
producing. This precarious balancing act, if it could be effected,
has been termed “the pastoral ideal,” by historian Leo Marx.
The basic concerns of the pastoral ideal were germinated
by a much more complex appreciation of both the individual and
society than as merely producers of goods and services who would,
by the natural-law heuristics of Adam Smith, quickly evolve into
an efficient economy producing the most benefit for the most
people. Jefferson worried that the United States might not , in fact,
inevitably form a society of production that would also promote
human rights. It just might require careful planning for anything
like the good life (however one individual wished to define it) to
prevail, or, equally important, a larger polity composed of
communities with a felt responsibility toward each other, and
where informed conversation preceded decision making, the sine
qua non of a healthy democracy.
And so, Jefferson and others contemplated just what sort of
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continual progression toward the individual good life in a
democratic system. And this is where intangibles like trust,
communal good and altruisms, the daily ebb and flow of productive
engagement, and a common idea of public virtues come in. The
United States was largely an agrarian country from its inception
through the nineteenth century. The real history becomes
immeasurably more complex with half of the country depending
upon slavery as the driving force of its economy, and many other
scholars with much greater knowledge and insight into this fact
than I could bring to bear continue to examine its meaning. So, the
reader must forgive me if I discuss a largely theoretical landscape,
that was expressed only in pockets of the country where even they
could not have been immune from the existence of slavery in the
rest of culture. It was this theoretical landscape upon which the
pastoral ideal was based.
In this ideal, there are certain social aspects of the
landscape and human nature which must be factored in. In the

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large national picture, no serious thinker was contemplating that
the United States could completely avoid the industrial revolution
and not become an economic vassal state to Europe. We had to do
some of our own manufacturing on our own soil in order to avoid
being held economically hostage. We needed to be able to
manufacture tools and mills of our own, at the very least so that
the agricultural products could be bought, sold, and exported, as
value-added commodities, like clothing, tools, and certain
foodstuffs. On the other hand, there are some very significant
aspects of the life of the freeholder individual farmer that seemed
essential.
Say you live in a New England farming village of, perhaps,
five hundred people. You may have some citizens whose lives are
not farming, directly, and these would constitute both
manufacturing and service. Certainly there would have to be a
blacksmith to produce and repair farming-related devices. The
town might also employ, by public agreement, the construction of
a schoolhouse and the salary of a teacher, and for clergy. There
might be a retail establishment, and, perhaps, a lawyer. But think

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again of the landscape. Think of what you, an average citizen,
would do and observe on a daily basis, as you got up each morning
and went out your front door. If most of the farms are of modest
size, say thirty or forty acres, your little burg would have a radius
of interaction where it would be quite possible to know everyone,
at least the principle households of every other farm.
When you got up in the morning to do your chores,
depending on the season, you knew exactly how it felt, in time
spent buying and selling, planting and harvesting, and overall
application of muscle power and skill, to run your farm
successfully. Not only that, but you had an extremely good sense of
what the other people in town were doing, and what it felt like for
them. Your closest neighbors could even be seen doing pretty much
what you were doing. In all the patterns of daily life, your sense of
self was continuously reconfirmed by the patterns of the others in
your community.
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If the town were to decide on a referendum, allowing a
railroad to come through, improving Main street, or even floating a
bond to build a firehouse, you cast your vote with others whom you
pretty much understood. Of course, that does not guarantee
perfect harmony. Every community has its differences and its
curmudgeons. A bachelor-farmer might decide that he doesn’t want
to help pay to build a schoolhouse and educate other folks’ kids.
They aren’t his kids, and besides, those with kids also have an extra
asset, namely the children can help with farm work for a number of
years before they leave home. He, on the other hand, has to tough it
out all alone, and it just reinforces his perspective that life has
never been quite fair to him. But this situation is a far cry from
having the town suddenly overrun by gangsters from the big city,
with the people under siege by a group of “outsiders.” This is
much more like dealing with the random mild eccentric in your
midst. It even calls for a kind of shrugging empathy from others.
Still, everyone can easily fathom, be they well-liked or
marginalized, what the other person’s life efforts amount to, and it
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experience that communal decisions are made, and this common
experience expectation can hold individuals personally and
communally responsible for those decisions.
To summarize the hypothetical example of the pastoral
ideal described above, one might say that, without having to
intellectualize the ethics of a community, the coherence and
mutuality born of close association are simply given. Things like
understanding, trust, and by extension, empathy and compassion
arise from the very physical proximity of the community and the
transparency of their life-patterns. But is this kind of homely
example of tranquility and altruism not merely an ideal, but a
fiction which never had a real life exemplar? Nearly every deep
insight into the human condition comes as an essential paradox.
The utterance itself is true given one particular experience and
presuppositions. Change the experience or the underlying
postulates and the precise opposite conclusion may also be true. Or,
to paraphrase the great twentieth century physicist, Niels Bohr, the

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opposite of a truly profound idea is also a profound idea. However,
there are some ideas whom another great physicist and
contemporary of Bohr’s, Wolfgang Pauli, would characterize as
“not even wrong.” An old aphorism that I would put in the latter
category is “familiarity breeds contempt.” My handbook of famous
quotations tells me that this is an observation of Aesop, from his
fable “The Fox and the Lion.” It also tells me that Mark Twain
outwitted the fableist with “familiarity breeds contempt—and
children.”
Contempt is an exceptionally powerful word, and we should
be very careful in using it. For a person to be considered
contemptible, in its truest sense, is almost beyond imagining,
beyond hatred and loathing. It does not need the intensifier
“utterly,” as in “utterly contemptible,” which words we often see
together. It indicates such extreme revulsion that the person
holding it sees nothing redeemable, nothing explainable, nothing
human or in any way of the natural world in the other. This is not
for the other to be alien in a way of simply being different, but as
antithetical to any normal human impulse. There are only a few

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characters in history who have seemed only contemptible, but
many more who have segregated their lives into parts ugly and at
least moderately human. So, it is in part simply the undiluted
power of the word which, for me, when coupled to something
breezy like “familiarity,” is so jarring as to be senseless. So, let’s
couple it with another word which is both less extreme in degree
than is contempt, and also keeps the same personal scale of
relationship (“this is my perception of the person” rather than
being tantamount to a global truth). We could use, instead, the
word “hate.” Hate is much less potent than contempt. It is possible,
we are told by those who say they are capable of hate, or who claim
that they are experiencing hatred at the time, that it is possible for
them to hate someone and even have a certain respect. Contempt
has no room in it for even a modicum of respect.
Does familiarity breed even hatred? Not usually. Real
familiarity, by which I don’t just physical proximity, but regular
essential interactions and, most especially, communication, does not

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breed hatred except in exceptionally rare instances. These include
situations where the parties are extensively damaged in some
psychological or neurological way, in which case it is difficult to
come to terms with the situation within the contexts of even a
liberally-defined spectrum of human response; or perhaps, through
extreme social trauma occasioned by those outside the relationship
of familiarity, as in armed ethnic or religious conflicts that sweep
through a village, otherwise peaceful. The reader may be thinking
of any number of other injustices from the evening news, and that
is what we are given as information about what is going on. Again,
what is really going on, in most cultures, in most epochs, for most
of the time they cohere, is conversation. Just as health is the
normal state of most bodies, most of the time, getting on with
community and living has been the normal state of most groups of
people. And just to keep this seemingly undifferentiated state of
affairs going on (certainly nothing to talk about on the evening
news) requires an extraordinary communication and negotiation all
the time. But I digress (just a little).
Even for people within our communities variously defined

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who seem completely at variance with our perceptions and solely
focused on their own isolated agendas (like teenagers!), if they are
known to us, if we communicate and associate and cooperate with
any regularity it is impossible to have a regard of anything
remotely like hatred. We may worry, keep our distance, implore,
ignore for a while, or be frustrated, but these are just the dynamics
of difficult conversation. Real aversion to another who was once a
regular associate can only grow when conversation stops.
iii) And Your Point Is?
So, what does all this have to do with money, let alone the
supposed theme of this chapter, the power of surrogates, whatever
that means? Well, we’re getting there. But we have to add in a bit
more cultural history to get the background right. We need to get
from the nineteenth century to somewhere near the present. First
of all it is important to remember that the concept of a pastoral

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ideal was an iffy one at best in early nineteenth century America.
This ideal, if it were to prevail, would have to be one of vision,
consciously decided upon. It would also depend upon the
maintenance of some profound transparencies. If communities
grew so large that it was impossible to know everyone, or at least
to be able to account for their presence in relation to someone else
you did know, where then would be the human empathetic element
of community? If the patterns and doings of our livelihoods
became utterly alien to others in the community, how would they
understand what we felt, believed, and why? There would
inevitably be large centers of commerce, if the country were to
remain connected to the rest of the world and even to itself. But if
the essential coherent unit of life, after the family, were not to be
the transparent community in conversation with itself, known to
itself, then where would we find our existential feet?
The indications from England, the first nation out of the
gate in industrialization, were that the pastoral ideal would require
constant vigilance, modulation, accommodation, and conscious
choice based upon a firm grasp of the ways of the world as well as
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of which paths would allow pursuit of some consensus of good
life, and which paths would be by their natures poisonous. It is one
thing to consider such public philosophy when the cultural
landscape remains open. It is quite another to be a serious public
philosopher when every aspect of living, the entire economic,
aesthetic, physical, technological, and ideational landscape has
already moved to another, very different, threshold. One must
always deal, if a philosophy is to be any use at all, with the “facts
on the ground” at the time. This is not really a prescription as
much as an observation. One cannot help but respond to the world
you are in.
And so we move, for the purposes of our discussion here, to
one final change in money and work, namely the final
establishment of the imperative that “time is money.” In our
whirlwind tour we have briefly glimpsed the evolution from “this is
this,” or pre-barter, to barter, to the symbolic intermediary of
money. Here goods are assigned an intermediate valuation,

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depending on a host of subtle human perceptions, only one of
which is “supply and demand.” But what happens when what you
do for a living is, not so much to bring something about on your
own terms, from a bushel of wheat, to a shirt, a patent medicine, or
a musical performance for which you are paid, but instead, you pay
out hours of your life in return for that symbolic intermediary,
money? What happens when the hours you expend to get that
money is simply part of a large process, and not that ultimate
thing itself ? What happens when you do that specialized work in
an anonymous factory into which you disappear from your
community in the morning and reemerge at night? After Edison
invented the time-clock there were undoubtedly many workers
more than willing to “punch the clock,” though not necessarily
according to operating instructions.
There was nothing in the pastoral ideal to make sense of
the new and widespread fungibility of the world of work. There
was popular refrain about soldiers returning from the First World
War “How ya’ gonna keep ‘em down on the farm once they’ve seen
gay Paree.” However, by that time the folk wisdom it may have
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reflected about the attraction of novelty and the exotic to young
people wanting to join the ranks of modernization and all it
entailed was already dated. The exodus had already begun. Still, it
was more lyrical and romantic to attribute the abrupt desertion of
the family farm to an encounter with the famed center of European
culture.
A century earlier even this romanticized explanation would
not have had a lot of meaning. Obviously, at the time when
Jefferson was concerned with the sustainability of the pastoral
ideal, or even when Henry Adams was trying to make sense of the
flow of history, very few Americans could afford to go to Paris. But
if you had, once you got back to the United States where would
you go? If you were Henry Adams you would stay in Boston,
which had its own learned and cultural dimensions, or you might
go to Washington, D.C. If you were among the educated elite, you
could certainly be gainfully employed by a university or as a
diplomat, but there weren’t many of them nor any great hew and
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cry to fill empty positions-in-waiting. However, things were very
different in the Progressive Era. All was motion. The job
opportunities, and the adventures of the world being born anew,
were in the cities. Families scattered and fragmented like never
before. But the worst was yet to come.
As work became more anonymous and opaque, we needed
other ways to speak for ourselves. That includes speaking to
ourselves with the psychological assurances that we were doing
alright with our own lives. It is also speaking with symbols to a
larger community with which we couldn’t have actual verbal, face-
to-face conversations to establish that we were, indeed, successful
at life. In a culture of relatively stable life-patterns, especially
within the dimensions of pastoralism, there is often a simple
congruence between the signatures of a life well-lived (according
to what is possible to do in such a society) that would be affirmed
by one’s community, and the qualities of a life well-lived arrived at
through individual spiritual and philosophical introspection. If one
couldn’t distinguish between honest reflection from within and
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substitute the latter for the former. This is very considerably the
condition of modernity and post-modernity, and it is an essential
conflation driving the success (if indeed it does succeed in the long
term) of the much heralded free market global economy, for
reasons I hope to make clear.
Already by 1899, American economist Thorstein Veblen
had coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to characterize the
way the monied class expressed their worth. It wasn’t enough to
simply have things in an increasingly anonymous society of
professions, specialized and hidden work. The right kinds and
amounts of physical property, and their profligate display, would
announce the de facto aristocracy in a country that prided itself on
not having an aristocracy. That is alright in the nineteenth century
when the owners of corporations want to make sure they have
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oligarchies depend upon millions of employees who themselves are
settling out in strata of relative wealth, education, expertise, and
authority? Not everyone was a Carnegie, Rockefeller, or a Hearst.
Why work so hard driving the economic engine, why work so hard
for education and professional accreditation if you can’t distinguish
yourself for those labors to the world, or at least your
neighborhood?
Fortunately for the leisure class, the very things that were
producing their wealth were the sale of the very sorts of things
that could differentiate one person from another. The very icons
that could tell the individual that he or she was a success, and
receive the all important feedback from the rest of society that
they were succeeding, were for sale! And this feedback loop ran
faster and faster, epitomized by Alfred Sloan’s General Motors
hierarchy and the annual model change. A Chevrolet sedan
announced a young working-class household on its way up....to the
next model. And the ladder in General Motors automobiles was
well differentiated until perhaps the last quarter century. It went
essentially from Chevrolet to Pontiac to Oldsmobile to Buick to

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Cadillac. If you were a “professional” you probably ought to at least
be driving an Oldsmobile.
And of course, automobiles were simply one of many ways
to announce yourself. But the automobile is also probably the
single most significant fact on the ground to trace the trajectory of
social values in this century. To say that Americans love their
automobiles is an understatement of inestimable proportions. In
truth, the total picture of time-for-money-for-goods and services,
the fraction of time and effort that the average American citizen
can account to being spent out of their entire mortality to the
automobile is unknown. At least I can see no way to get any sort of
accurate fix on it except to stand in awe of its immensity.
It isn’t just the price of purchasing an automobile,
insurance and repairs, fuel, etc. If we count all the business that
exists solely because the automobile demands it, we would be hard
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maintenance of the amazing automobile infrastructure includes
government agencies at every level; untold billions in physical
assets in roadways, bridges, tunnels; and businesses that would not
exist at all if not for the automobile. These businesses once
included the mining of raw material and its shipment, the
production of components and final assembly, aftermarket
accessories, automobile dealerships, used car franchises,
advertising, and of course the petroleum industry from raw
material to refining to retail (filling stations). Note that I said that
the attendant businesses once included these appendages. Not only
have all of these businesses exploded since the 1930’s, but we have
added a host of others to the list that simply don’t make sense
without the automobile. To this must be added motels, fast food, a
large chunk of the domestic tourist industry, and drive-through
everythings, including churches. Finally, the very physical
construction of our communities are built primarily to
accommodate the automobile so that for most people not living
right in an urban core with good public transport, you simply can’t
get anywhere to do anything at all without an automobile. Have I

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left anything out?
But this is a culture where time is money, and money
measures who and what we are. The majority of working
Americans spend more time behind their steering wheels than any
other single spot, except perhaps in bed, and for some in a chair in
front of a screen, television or computer. That time behind the
wheel is, except for professional drivers, not time for which you are
paid, but in the “time is money” equation this is also an expense. If
it were possible to make a full accounting of all the ways that the
American productive economy pays for the use of their
automobiles and then converted that into some measure of average
wage time, I would not be at all surprised if the answer came out
to be something more than an eight hour work day! And that
answer is completely absurd, since there are not more than twenty
four hours in a day, we know we are at work for eight (many of us
certain that we are doing something different there from just
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most expensive debt is our mortgage or rent) and we know we are
sleeping for something like eight of them, if we are lucky. Which
can only mean two things. Part of the remaining time we think we
are doing something else actually involves cars, or we do lots of
other things while we are driving them. At least one of the things
we are doing while driving is announcing to the real community
(the mobile one—that is, the one we see the most of) who we are.
I have learned a lot from my students, about all sorts of
things. I have great respect for them, and many of them are not
only eager to learn for its own sake, to deepen their understandings
and appreciations, but are also doing this under very strenuous
conditions, working to support themselves while going to school. I
needed to say this so that the following comments appear in the
context of general observation, not as an indictment. The tuition
at state-run universities is generally a bargain compared with
private institutions, and our school is a bargain by a considerable
margin even when compared to most other public institutions.

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Several years ago our administration tried to float a tuition
surcharge, and put it up for student vote, with information about
what could and could not be expected without some additional
revenue. The maelstrom that followed was, to my knowledge,
unprecedented in our little school’s history. The issue became a line
drawn in the sand for forces of good and evil, even among faculty.
Again, for students of very modest means, especially single parents
who must work as well, there is no doubt that seemingly small
changes in a household budget can become “go/no-go” decisions. It
is difficult to tell who was who in the ensuing firestorm. Perhaps
some of those stridently against any fees were from well-to-do
families, but were firmly convinced this was wrong out of empathy
for others. I would hope that to be the case.
But I always sensed a strange disjuncture when I would
come to work in the morning during that time. At that time I had
just bought a new compact car, the first new car I had ever owned.
(I know, what a pathetic martyr!) But I was always surprised by the

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number of student cars with sticker prices beyond what I could
afford. Of course, there were also some old bombs, the kind of car
I recognized from my student days, but there were plenty of late
model sports cars, sport utility vehicles, and the like. Now, I know I
am playing devil’s advocate here, and I am just thinking out idle
impressions. But I couldn’t help wonder how many kids felt they
had every right, and didn’t even blink in this assumption, to own
and drive a thirty thousand dollar automobile, but were outraged at
a proposed three hundred dollar fee. To be fair, perhaps these
populations were completely separate, and if so my ruminations
upon pulling into the parking lot were of no more substance than
any visual discontinuity in one’s personal landscape. The student
body has a wide socio-economic variance, which I know from
personal acquaintance with students whom I consider truly heroic
in the burdens they have shouldered. Perhaps what I saw was just
(laid out as a piece of installation art that would arrive every day in
the parking lot) the automotive motif of disparity, and the
surreality of our consumer culture.
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ever just gone for a drive in their cars without needing to get
anywhere. Now, this is a fairly ridiculous question, and
appropriately I would at first get some unbelieving stares back as
though they must not have quite understood what I said. When I
asked “why,” I got answers like, “I just drive to unwind sometimes,”
“it clears my head,” “it really is one of the few spaces where I can
be sure I have it to myself and nobody is going to bother me.” And
I know what they’re talking about. I have sometimes felt that way
myself.
Alright, so we like our cars, and we spend an amazing
proportion of our mortality, our “life-capital,” to use them. So what
am I saying, that perhaps we should become a little more aware of
lugging two tons-plus of metal around to move a single one
hundred and fifty pound body, that maybe we should get out more--
and not by getting in the car? No, that is not what I am saying.
That much is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said. My
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than that, because at its core I think it allows us to penetrate the
meaning of what we do. I think it can illuminate much of what we
are devoting, as a culture, most of our time and energy to doing,
and what we are trying to get the rest of the world to do as well.
And we are trying to get the rest of the world to follow us for two
reasons. The most obvious is that our consumer culture needs
consumers. The second reason is more subtle, but I think is even
more profound. That is, we want company. Psychologically, if we
can get everyone to agree on a similar path to success then it seems
to put the ground under our feet, at least for a while. If we have
lots of company in our pursuits, the very fact of similar
assumptions relieves us of the truly difficult questions, such as
“why do this instead of that.” It puts distance between our
functional, daily selves, and any inner self that might be so careless
of our sanity as to ask what we think of our own mortality and
what we are doing with it.
And what is it that we do, that begs for the comfort of lots
of others doing the same thing to avoid spiritual freefall? We
pursue surrogates, and in their essence surrogates are all the same.
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A surrogate, as I wish to use the term here, is an action or thing
which is a response to a very real felt need, but which is not the
thing or action that the soul is asking for. The true fundamental
quantities and qualities are those which, if supplied, not only
satisfy the most apparent, or first-order, desires, but they also
cultivate ever deeper-dimensional desires with ever deeper-
dimensional rewards, one of which is always profound gratitude.
We can reckon lots of surrogates that we pursue, which were not
invented sui generis by the industrial society,
but which have been so amplified by the historical particulars
discussed above, that these surrogates have not yet completely run
out of gas.
I must really take care not to sound too preachy, here, and I
must continually remind myself that what I would really wish to
do through this writing is examine and observe, to possibly open a
different insight, to help myself and anyone else understand our

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fundamental quantities and qualities, our truest postulates, and to
ask questions of them in the spirit of gratitude, not frustration or
desperation. In other words, I am aiming primarily to open the
windows of understanding enough for us to envision; completely
accepting the certainty that different individuals, thinking and
feeling with empathy and unencumbered by delusion, will
nonetheless generate different visions. That, after all, is one of the
glories of the human experience. We are not all here just to
provide a critical mass of the species so that we don’t go extinct. If
my observations seem skewed, or saturated with some political or
cultural agenda please forgive me. I am simply doing the best that I
can with the intimations and visions I have participated in, and my
fortunes and difficulties of particular experiences and associations.
I needed to say this now, at this juncture, before continuing,
and it is my sincere hope that my writing aids in positive reflection,
not to be used as ammunition in pitched battles between any
groups certain that they have it right, once and for all. Any such
motive will have missed the true feeling behind my words. I don’t
think any of us has it “right,” as some fixed point, not because I

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think we have all got it wrong, but rather because I tend to believe
in the potential of the evolution of understandings. And that
means, among other things, that wherever we have arrived,
individually or collectively, is where we ought to be. We create our
own starting points, of what it is possible to think and do, because
of where we are. However, part of that glory of human experience
is awareness. If anything can be accounted as wrong it is to
deliberately waste wisdom. We need to seek wisdom, and seek to be
wise together, and then discover what new wisdoms are available to
us in our new landscapes.
I hope this discussion of the power of surrogates does not
just sound like an old-school moralist. That does not mean that I
consider these reflects to have no moral correlates, consequences,
or responsibilities that is the stuff of the very material
philosophies which have given us the intellectual tools to blithely
hollow out our spiritual lives, especially in our communities of
commerce and politics. What I mean by “old-school moralisms,” are

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the sorts of dispositions that yield an array of simplistic dismissals
for actual or perceived problems with society. Some of the most
pliable (not affected by critical examination) have familiar
preambles e.g., the past was always ‘better,’ in some way; any of the
myriad complaints about “kids these days”; or the millennialist
sentiments that the whole world is rotting like decaying garbage
because we are all stuck in some cosmic drama that we are
constrained to play out to the final scene; etc.
Without recognizing what our true desires and best
fulfillments may be, surrogates will come screaming in to fill the
void. If we fail to realize the power of surrogate needs filling in for
real ones, we might just waste time, at least our mortalities, and
that is a shame considering the alternative. There are some who
tend to think that our present inclinations as a culture and a planet,
may provide their own correctives. In other words, in some ways of
thinking, we will all be forced to become ecologically aware, for
example, as the evidence of not living sustainably comes washing
up on our shores, infecting our food supply, etc. Then, when we
can’t get away from our own waste we will be constrained to think
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respectfully of this world.
I don’t know about that, but in a way I really hope this is
not the case. And I don’t simply mean the obvious, namely that I
hope we will not bring ourselves to the brink of disaster before we
bring ourselves to our senses. What I mean is that I think it is an
ignoble proposition that the only way for us to act outside our own
narrow interests, is when the larger world comes crashing in and
threatens to strip us of our own narrow interest. And what I find
most ignoble about this, is that it represents just the latest version
of simplistic Enlightenment philosophy, which certainly has
brought us amazing knowledge, but not necessarily wisdom. It is
simply moving from the clockwork universe and the “invisible
hand” of Adam Smith, to the next level of “getting things right,”
not due to any higher sensibility that may pull us, individually and
collectively, to be more giving, more compassionate, more
considerate and less acquisitive, but just irrevocably, because, after
all, “it’s the law.”

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If we are even the least bit conscious, when we see toxins
piling up in our own back yard, we will become afraid and angry,
and if enough of us do that than we will, as a society, become more
ecologically minded. And our disposition towards the biosphere are
just one example. Our culture is filled with experts of every stripe
who are convinced that systems of law which must rest at an
immediate level of “enlightened self interest” will act as
mechanisms, if properly adjusted and with the right feedback
loops, so that we will all stop doing the “bad stuff,” that populations
fear. Societies absolutely need laws. We can’t wait for Plato’s
“Philosopher King” to take over. Furthermore, societies are, in fact,
populated with individuals of all ages, and all levels of
psychological and moral development which don’t always comport
with their age. Yes, society is messy. We all do have to live together.
But I find it depressing to entertain the thought that none of us, or
most of us as we mature, can be counted upon to act through
altruism, compassion, empathy, and maturing levels of wisdom
through honest reflection.
I know that the social-progressive mechanists could trot

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out case after case, whether in ecology or the machinations of war
or biases of every sort, that could be marshaled in testament that
we really are just billions of stimulus-response organisms. But I
also know of far too many examples, up close and personal, giving
eloquent testimony that we are not all that way, that we don’t have
to be that way. In fact, to act only from the most immediate self
interest is not the true human condition at all, but evidence of
spiritual amputation and anaesthesia. That is anaesthesia in its
most literal sense to be cut off from aesthetic.
In considering our dependence on surrogates instead of
authenticity, the drug analogy of anaesthesia is actually quite apt.
We know pretty well, from modern neuroscience, what many
stimulants and opiates do in the body and brain. We can map what
lights up, which synapses, receptors and transmitters, and which
clusters of the brain are engaged when things like cocaine or
heroin circulate. We know, at least in the flatland projection of the
physical correlates in the body, when an individual under a

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functional MRI scan is sensing extreme pleasure, pain, anxiety,
visual imagery, calm, and on and on. We also know that opiates and
stimulants, to name just two broad classes of drugs, are not merely
a potential threat to the physical body in perceptible ways, but
become psychologically damaging as well. If they are used as a
surrogate placeholder for an authentic need in one’s life, many of
these substances require their usage at increasing dosages and
greater frequency. Again, we can argue this case from
neurobiology. We can actually map the tolerances build up, we can
see the atrophy of brain receptors or the waning of the body’s own
ability to produce its own endorphins, or whatever.
I would suggest that this is a physical observation that does
have its own validity, but that there is a psychical element often
involved. If one feels one’s existence is flat and colorless and then
ingests some euphoria-inducing concoction, the stimulation of the
pleasure centers is intense in very large degree because that state
of mind contrasts so starkly with the undifferentiated state of
ennui that preceded it. And so the effect of increased dependence is
not simply a matter of an increasing physical tolerance to the

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substance’s effects; it is also a matter of trying to recapture the
intense pleasure DIFFERENCE one first experienced. Our five
physical senses seem predisposed not so much to notice
unchanging states, but rather differences in those states. I would
argue here that our psychological perceptions of inner states
follow a similar pattern. Even in the nineteenth century,
physiologists were very interested in understanding and measuring
these threshold differences of physical perception.
If you place your hand in a cup of warm water you
immediately notice that the temperature differs from the air around
it. But in a very short time, you won’t be able to tell much of
anything, except the visual perception that your hand is in water. If
you change the temperature of the water, by adding a little hot
water or an ice cube, you will notice that for a while until you
become acclimated to it. And again, these are within reasonable
limits of ranges where the body is not jeopardized by burning or
freezing. If you are placed in a dark room and someone lights a

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candle behind you, you will notice the difference between utter
darkness and dim illumination. But if there are already one
hundred candles lighted in the room, you won’t notice the
difference in illumination of the one hundred and first being added,
even though the total difference in illumination between the latter
case and the first.
Furthermore, it is not only a non-linear proportionality
that is the essence of the discrimination capability of our senses,
but time is also involved. You would notice if the water
temperature in the cup were to change from seventy degrees to
eighty degrees in one second. But if this were a continual, regular
increase over half an hour, you wouldn’t notice it. So even from a
physiological standpoint we are predisposed to notice, first of all
change, not stasis. Secondly, we are more aware of greater
proportional changes of degree (of any stimulus) than simply
changes in the degree of stimulus. And thirdly, we are even more
aware of sensation when it is not only changing, and the
proportional change of intensity is greater, but when the rate of
change in time is greater. These seem to be the hierarchies of

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stimulus in the order that we take notice of them, as opposed to
assigning them to parts of our environment that do not require
our attention. I would like to suggest that there is a similar
correlate beyond sensory
input, but for other things that rise above the great oceans of
“what is” and seem to demand our attention.
If we lack the sensory response of good company and
friends, meaningful work and a sense of contribution, we may very
well substitute the merely physiological response of neurological
euphoria or disconnection. The paleobiologist would explain that
these physiological-neurological urges are extremely valuable
products of evolution, which produced such survival traits as
sociability and mutuality, aversion and protective response, and
reproduction and mate selection. I don’t know. Maybe they did
arrive that way. But however they got here, a description can only
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describe. An intervention (prodding the brain in one way or
another to produce euphoria, for instance) can only reveal a
connection. I hold out for spaceland, for upward not northward. I
hold out that, however elaborate our explanations become, they are
only this world’s correlates to something greater which, for lack of
a more precise word, I call the spiritual. I hold out for this not out
of desperation, but because it feels true to my very best
intimations. I hold out that the spiritual dimension to our existence
is real, not because I feel diminished if I don’t, but because, like A.
Square following his experience of other dimensions, I would feel
like a liar.
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Chapter 5: A World of Acceleration (or, why jump from a
window?)
To the extent that we are pursuing surrogates, what are
they? The easy conclusion is the accumulation of stuff and money.
And the propensity toward acquisitiveness has a history,
represented somewhere by some people, as long as the existence of
humankind so far as we can tell. So, by itself, this doesn’t tell us
very much that we don’t already know. Neither does the fact that
acquisitiveness beyond the needs of comfort is a surrogate for
other things, such as power, authority, or even mating privileges
tell us much that might be peculiar to our times, though it remains
a timeless aspect of wisdom to be aware of this. In fact, at times
the relative wealth of an individual or a nation has also been
conflated with its spiritual worthiness, its divine selection, and a

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signature that it was called upon to keep doing what it was already
doing. This is also most important to keep in mind as a historical
referent.
What I think distinguishes the leading, and rising,
economic powers of today, and the disposition of the individuals
making their ways in those economies, is the attraction of motion,
and not simply motion but accelerated motion a difference in our
sensations. Of course, I am not speaking only of physical motion,
but that is included and that is why the automobile seems such a
potent and informing signature of our condition. In the brave new
world of global market economies, we get prognoses and diagnoses
daily on the news and in leading-edge disquisitions from experts
who sometimes really do know a lot. We label these economic and
social analysts from radical left, to radical right, to center,
depending largely, we suppose, on the degree to which they favor
tinkering with the machine over letting the machine run by itself.
But the fact is that, even though the machine has got
humans in it who can change their minds and dispositions, there

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remains the fundamental assumption that we are dealing with
mechanism here, and the very word mechanism is often invoked
when talking about market dynamics. And, as we have seen, this
description is a direct result of our understandable awe of
Enlightenment thinking, and the Promethean marvels that
followed. This mechanism may misbehave (go chaotic, or worse,
random) for a while, but it usually doesn’t, and if it does
“misbehave,” everyone agrees that such conditions warrant
attention and usually adjustment. The most wondrous aspect of
this worldview is that, like a law of nature, it will prevail and bring
us into harmony with its fundamental truths. It relieves us of
responsibility, especially communal behavior, and if the machine
does misbehave it need not concern the majority of us. Like a
locomotive built upon sound scientific and engineering principles,
only the technicians need be concerned with occasional lubrication
and adjustment.
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i) A brief excursion by way of physics
I have so far made great use of the metaphor of the
machine. In actual historical appreciation of how market capitalism
has been understood, this is so ingrained that it is not even a
metaphor, as long as one does not confine the definition of a
machine only to a chunk of iron with pistons and wheels. Instead
of Newton’s laws of motion (which is solely about how masses
move when the are pushed or pulled), we can directly substitute the
laws of Adam Smith, which predict how wealth moves when
pushed or pulled by supply and demand. The cross-over from
Newton to Smith, including everything from 1) inertia, 2) friction,
and 3) acceleration are not just metaphors, but directly translatable
into 1) unrealized demand, 2) the absence of laissez-faire
government, and lastly 3) the unfettered market economy. Whether
or not a modern economist knows this connection to Newton’s
physics is not important, because they use the same rules in
translation anyway. Therefore, economists would do well to know
something about the physics behind the economics to understand
what it implies. And it turns out that, whatever you may have heard
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about physics as a subject to be avoided at all costs in school, its
essentials, and even some of its more abstract concepts, are not all
that hard to grasp. In fact, I have found it vastly more transparent
than economic theory, and it just may be the easiest way for us to
explore, without all the jargon of international finance, what is
going on. This book is not intended to be a primer on the high
school physics you may have never taken, but with your indulgence
I think the next few pages will best set the stage for understanding
this great economic enterprise we are all supposed to be devoting
our livelihoods, if not our lives, to preserving and expanding.
The current situation of predicting market behavior is
mathematically a bit like predicting the weather. At one time
scientists thought it might, in theory, actually be able to predict
something as complex as weather and climate if one simply had
enough variables accounted for. In its most sledgehammer version,
you might have to know the exact position and velocity of every
molecule at a given instant, and the future input of energy from

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the sun, and run as many simultaneous equations as there are
discrete particles. Well, no one actually gave that much thought
except for philosophers who wanted to prove whether or not there
needed to be a creator or not. But with the increasing
sophistication of physical insights and mathematical techniques
like thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, it still might be possible
to divide the atmosphere and the earth’s surface into enough blobs
of stuff, and trace their interactions as though they were discrete
bodies, and then maybe your calculations might just be possible by
computer, and reasonably accurate for more than a few hours at a
time.
But already in the 1960s this approach as well proved
inadequate, as it was discovered that small changes do not always
tend to return to their original stable values, or equilibria, but
might actually send whole systems zooming off to vary for a while
around a new equilibrium condition, such as temperature,
precipitation, energy capture, etc. This new stable equilibrium,
around which the measured values now make their usual
oscillations of values, is called a strange attractor. The insight was

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elsewhere)
that things in complex systems like the atmosphere (or, as it turns
out, in the human body) don’t always return to normal, if what you
mean is what you already have in terms of annual temperature,
annual rainfall, average number of tropical storms, etc.
Nonetheless, complex systems with natural feedback mechanisms
DO find SOME new equilibrium state, and then may oscillate
around those new conditions.
Think of a marble rolling in a salad bowl. This is the case
of the “spherical pendulum” in classical mechanics. Left by itself,
the marble lies at the lowest point in the bowl, in the middle (if it’s
symmetrical), and at rest. If you swirl the bowl around, or reach in
and push the marble, it will start rolling around, not just around in
a circle but also curving up and down. Eventually (when you stop
pushing it!) its oscillating motions will get less and less until it
loses all its energy (to rolling friction and sound) and it lies still at
the bottom, in the middle again. Now imagine you have your
kitchen table-top covered with salad bowls, with the ball bearing in
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one of them, maybe in the middle of your table, and push it
around. If you don’t push it too hard, it will swirl around in the
bowl where you put it. If you really give it a good shove, it might
move with such energy that it hops right out of that bowl, but
lands in another bowl, where it then swings around wildly for a
while, but, left alone, will eventually reduce its oscillations and rest
in the center of that bowl.
These bowls are a rough analogy to the aforementioned
strange attractors, and every one of the bowls represents some set
of conditions around which stable oscillations (think variations)
can occur, be corrected (to the parameters of this new attractor) by
feedback mechanisms. What I have done is give an analogy that
visualizes the effect of “not necessarily everything returning to
normal” from a kitchen table example of classical physics. But
within this model, you are not really surprised when you give this
ball bearing such a shove that it hops out and into another bowl. In
chaos theory what is surprising is that seemingly innocent inputs
can induce amplifying effects beyond the ability of the feedback
loops in the current equilibrium system to contain itself to those

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elsewhere)
conditions. That is one reason why it isn’t foolish to consider
unpredictable results from adding carbon dioxide to the
atmosphere. The earth’s weather system will always, over the long
run (until the sun runs out of fuel) oscillate around some set of
equilibrium conditions involving temperature, humidity,
precipitation, prevailing winds. The point is that exactly WHICH
equilibrium values it settles on, we don’t know. And it may not take
much change to have us settled into a fairly unpleasant strange
attractor. We speculate that Mars may once have been in a stable
equilibrium with conditions favorable to the evolution of life. Right
now, it is also in a stable equilibrium. Big difference!
I have started with analogies into seemingly simply physical
phenomena, but which you can still see at the level of a kitchen
table experiment. In order to fully appreciate the informing
analogies of physical dynamics to socio-economic dynamics, we
need to look at what are actually simpler examples because these
simpler examples are the ones that market dynamics have been
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thought to obey throughout most of economic theorizing, and I
ask the reader’s patience in establishing just a few more examples.
Here is a simple one that can actually be done on your kitchen table
with much less clutter. Let us suppose that you can clear off an
area of your kitchen counter of about six feet long, or you have a
long, smooth tabletop, or use the floor, as long as it doesn’t have a
carpet on it. Now take a little flat piece of wood. A ruler will do
nicely, as long as it is one of those cheap plastic ones with the
indented groove running down its length.
Here is the experiment. Lay the ruler flat on the surface and
place the marble on the ruler. If your surface (counter, table or
floor) is level, and you gently place the marble in the middle of the
ruler, it should stay put where you placed it. If you now hold the
marble still while you gently slide the ruler-marble combination
along the floor at a constant speed, you can soon let go of the
marble and, even though it is moving across the floor, the marble
will stay at the same place on the ruler. The ruler and marble are
moving at a constant speed, but relative to the ruler, the marble is
at rest. This is not so easy to do, and in fact you have an automatic
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visual feedback mechanism to help you. If you are changing the
speed at which you are sliding the ruler, acceleration or
deceleration, you will see the marble slide backward or forward on
the ruler.
In the ideal world of classical physics, it is at least possible
to imagine ideal conditions, situations where you can imagine
frictionless sliding surfaces, perfect levelness, etc. In the first case,
where ball and ruler lie still, you have the case of Newton’s first
law, where things at rest tend to stay at rest. You also have that
(harder to see, though) example of the first law in the second
situation, where things in motion tend to keep going in a constant
straight-line motion. You don’t see it as easily because you
recognize that if you stop pushing, the system slides to a stop,
which is the retarding force of friction. You get closer to seeing the
ideal case with an ice hockey puck being set in motion and
continuing in motion as roughly the same speed until it encounters
something else, like another hockey stick. However, if you continue

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to apply only enough push on the ruler to overcome the sliding
friction of the ruler on the floor, no more and no less, you will see
the marble stay put on the moving ruler and moving with it. If you
push harder than that on the ruler, the ruler will accelerate
(Newton’s second law). The ruler speeds up, but the marble tends
to stay where it was, or in the condition of constant speed across
the floor that it previously was.
If a continuous force greater than other countervailing
forces is applied to anything, it not only moves, but also increases
the rate of its movement. That is, it not only moves (its velocity),
but it picks up its rate of movement (acceleration). Gravity, at least
close to the earth, is considered a constant force. And so if you
drop something, it will not only move downward, but the rate at
which it moves downward also increases. Until something begins
to fall at a speed where the wind resistance begins to be
considerable compared to the force gravity is pulling on it, that
object will pick up speed at a regular rate. High school students
learn that this acceleration due to gravity (until wind resistance

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elsewhere)
becomes a factor) is thirty-two feet per second, every second, or an
increase of about twenty-two miles per hour.
This means that if you were to drop a marble from a
building high enough that it took a few seconds to hit the ground,
and you had people stationed at windows all the way down with
little speed detectors, the marble would have increased its speed of
falling from zero (you were holding it in your hand) as it falls. After
one second, the marble would be falling downward at a rate of
about 22 miles per hour; at the two second mark from when it was
released it would have reached a speed of about 44 miles per hour;
it were still falling at three seconds, its speed would have reached
about 66 miles per hour. That is, in each second it is adding to its
speed an additional speed of 22 miles per hour. In reality, you can’t
actually do this experiment for very long as a high school physics
class exercise, because during those three seconds the marble has
already dropped a distance of 144 feet, so you need a very high
building, and secondly, the faster it goes the more effect wind
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resistance has, and so you get further from the case where the only
force acting is gravity.
Now if you were to plot these different situations on a
graph, you find an interesting, but simple relationship. If you plot
where the marble is as time goes on, and you let the horizontal axis
of your graph represent time ticking off in seconds, and you let the
vertical axis represent where that marble is, that is, how far from you
measured in feet, you get some interesting lines. When the marble is
sitting still, the graph of where it is as time ticks off is a
horizontal line. If you stand right next to the marble, then that
horizontal line would lie right on top of the horizontal axis, which
when it hits the vertical axis, it intersects at the number zero. The
marble is right next to you, zero feet away, and no matter how long
you wait in seconds (time ticking off, moving along the horizontal
axis) the marble and you stay in the same place.
If the marble rolls away from you at a constant speed and
you graphed that, the graph would be a straight line again, but
slanting upward. If the marble is rolling at a rate of one foot in

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elsewhere)
every second, then as time marches on the marble is farther away
from you. If every mark on your time axis is one second of time,
and every mark of distance on the vertical axis is equal to one foot,
the graph would be a forty-five degree slope, cutting diagonally
through your graph. If you want to know how far away the marble
would be after three seconds, you would count along the horizontal
axis three marks or divisions, and then move up from that time
mark directly upward until your pencil hit your graph line, and
then read across to your distance axis to see what the number is.
And low and behold, when you move three units in time, and read
across to the distance axis, you find that the distance is three feet.
This isn’t surprising since you knew it was moving along happily
covering one foot in every second, so after three seconds you would
expect it would be three feet away. Gee, you didn’t need a graph for
that; it was obvious. But the very act of graphing gives you a
powerful tool to work with things that aren’t so obvious that you
could quickly intuit in your head.

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In fact, the slope of this line is equal to one, meaning that
for every second the marble rolls away from you another foot, one
for one. The slope of the graph of the marble at rest is reckoned as
zero. For each second you move across the horizontal axis (time
ticking off), when you read up to your graph of position you always
get the same number. If you started your measurement by
standing three feet away from the marble, then its position is three
feet, not zero. But if you or the marble doesn’t move, then no
matter how many seconds you wait, the distance is always three.
This graph would be a horizontal line as well, but it would be a
horizontal line with a constant number on the vertical axis of
three. It would be a flat and horizontal line, which was simply three
units up from the horizontal axis. And no matter how many
seconds you waited, the height of that line would always be the
same. No change with time.
What happens when not only is the marble moving, but also
for every second it moves, the very speed at which it moves picks
up, like the marble dropped from a window? Well, the graph of its
position as time clicked off would definitely not be a horizontal

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line, because it is definitely moving away. It would not even be a
straight inclined line, because in each second it is not only moving
away, but also the rate at which it is moving away is increasing.
The graph of this change of position would be a parabola. It
would start at zero and rise by the next second (it has moved
during that second), and the line representing how far it moved in
each successive second would get steeper, since as it picks up speed
it is covering more distance during each second. In basic
mathematics we call the degree of increase of a graph its slope. At
a constant speed, that slope is a single, unchanging, positive
number.
What is the slope of a curve, like the graph of the distance
of a falling body from when you let go of it? That is harder, and so
we say that we can try to say what its average speed is during some
short amount of time, say between the second and forth seconds.
And so we look at our curve and find out what the average distance
covered for the first two seconds is, and then compared that to the
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average speed is during the next two seconds, and you get a very
rough idea of the rate at which speed is changing, or, the rate at
which the rate of covering distance is. This is now a rate of a rate,
and we know that we have gotten just the most basic idea of this
rate of rate of change. In fact, the rate of covering distance is not
changing like that; rather it is continually changing, even within
the third and forth seconds, and within every part of every second.
So, even in first-semester college physics we use a branch of
mathematics devised by Newton to be able analyze things that can
change continuously in time (even in very complicated ways) called
the calculus. And using calculus we figure the rate of change of
something that itself has a rate of change by finding out the
mathematical function that describes what is already an abstract
picture, namely the graph. And of course the graph is a mental
construct, which already doesn’t look like a marble, distance
covered, or anything else, but is a translation of things that happen
in time into a picture of change. At least if a farmer were to
construct a bar graph, where the height of the bar represented
how much wheat he has in his silo in different months, you can sort
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of imagine those little bars to be miniature silos, and their height
on the graph to be actual physical depictions of miniature silos,
relatively full or empty. The translation into a graph of something
like the motion of a simple falling marble is more abstract, but we
have gotten used to it over the last three hundred years since the
invention of the calculus.
The particular tool in calculus to measure things that
change in time is called the derivative, and it allows us to measure
rates of change at an instant of time. And so the first derivative, (as
it is known) of the function of change of position with respect to
time of the marble standing still is, appropriately enough, zero. Its
position doesn’t have any change as time ticks off. If the marble is
moving at a constant speed, the first derivative of that
mathematical relationship is a constant number that is not zero. If
it is moving away from you at one foot every second, the first
derivative is one. Fair enough.

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However, when the marble doesn’t merely have a rate of
movement away from you, but that rate is changing, when you
perform the operation known as the first derivative you don’t get a
number, you get another mathematical function representing speed,
but this formula now includes a place in it for you to put in the
elapsed time you are interested in, and get a number (speed) at that
exact instant. Exactly how fast is the marble falling at the instant
my stopwatch tells me I dropped it two and a half seconds ago?
You can now get this number. Supposed I wanted to figure out,
from my graph of the position of a falling body, the rate at which
the rate of speed is picking up? Then you do the same procedure
again on the first derivative, and you will get another real number
telling you how much you can expect this marble to pick up speed
as time moves on, not just what its speed is, or how far it has
moved. What you have now done is calculated the second derivative.
If a constant force, like gravity near the earth with no
complications like friction, act on something like a marble, then this
second derivative, which tells you acceleration, is a fixed number.

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elsewhere)
Okay, let’s just go one step further. Suppose the force isn’t
constant but rather is increasing. The object is not only moving
(speed), but also picking up the rate at which it moves
(acceleration), and the rate at which it picks up the rate at which it
moves is also increasing. Okay, so we have simple position with no
change (first derivative is zero); we have constant motion (first
derivative is a constant); we have regularly increasing motion (first
derivative is now a time-dependent function itself, but the second
derivative is a real number). Do physicists have a term, like,
displacement, speed, or acceleration, to represent a changing rate
of acceleration (found by taking the third derivative)? Well, by this
time physicists prefer to just stay with the formulas themselves.
But they do have a term for this rate of change of rate of change
of rate of change. It is called “jerk,” for the obvious reason that if
you were to push or pull on something with a constant force you
get smooth acceleration, but if you jerked on the string attached to
it, even its acceleration would change.

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And finally, there is a fascinating little function of change
that occurs everywhere. It has the marvelous property of not only
being a rate of a rate of a rate of change, which it is. But that last
part, the rate at which acceleration increases, is not only an
amount, but it is an increasing amount that itself grows according
to how much acceleration you have at any given moment. You
might think this must be so far removed from any reality, that this
whole thing is just a brainteaser. But in fact, the little mathematical
formula is with us every day. It is called an exponential function.
The most bizarre thing about an exponential is that it has no end
of rate-increase dependencies folded in. You can calculate the rate
of increase of this graph at any embedded level; the rate of rate of
increase, the rate of rate of rate, on ad infinitum, and at every level
you keep finding another level of rate-depended increase! What
absolutely strange manner of beast is this? Well, we have lots of
them. If you were to put a microorganism in a big petri dish, with
lots of nutrients and ideal conditions, they would multiply at just
such an exponential fashion. These functions tend to zoom off to
infinity, no matter how humble they begin, in a big hurry.

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elsewhere)
There is a legend, whose origins may be apocryphal, of an
ancient Chinese mandarin who apprehended this. The story goes
that he was brought in to the emperor to solve some problem of
state, which the wise man did. The emperor, so impressed, asked
the wise man to name his reward, up to dominion over half the
kingdom. The wise man pointed to a nearby chessboard, which has
eight squares on a side, for a total of 64 squares. His proposition
was thus place one grain of rice on the first square, the two on the
next, then four and so on. Keep this up for each of the squares and
that will be my reward. The emperor laughed? Why such a
ridiculously modest request? No problem, a few days rice for the
old man, at best, the man must not only be humble but a fool. As it
turned out, the old man was a fool in the ways of imperial politics.
This is an exponential function, of the simplest kind, a doubling
function, the mathematical relationship is y = 2x, where x is the
number of each successive square. You will notice that the
independent variable, “x” is the exponent to which one raises some

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other number, and that changing exponent represents the number
of each successive square, but it could equally be something like
equal units of time ticking off. If you carry out this doubling
function [that is, the example represented by y = 2x] for the sixty-
four squares, the number of grains of rice you end up with on the
last square is very large indeed.
It turns out to be about two with nineteen zeros before the
decimal point, and this is just the amount of rice to be placed on
the last of the 64 squares, not the sum of the previous 63! Now, I
don’t know how many grain of rice goes into making a pound, but
given a few hours it is countable, maybe in the thousands--I’ll be
liberal. That takes up three zeros, converting pounds to tons takes
another three zeros. Another three and you are in the range of
thousands of tons, another three in the millions of tons, and you
have already gone beyond the complete global production of rice in
the modern world. And you still have yet to use up the next seven
zeros, which would mean multiplying by another ten million! So,
roughly, the sage was merely asking for at least something on the
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elsewhere)
order of the total imaginable annual production of our entire earth
multiplied ten million times. According to the version I heard, once
the emperor got done laughing he had the wise man executed.
So, does nature really provide us with such anarchic
processes? Well, yes, sort of. The petri dish of multiplying
microbes is very real, but so are the boundaries. No matter how
large the petri dish, in very short order the number of microbes
will be so large that they will have eaten all their nutrients, and
they begin to starve, and that is precipitous. They are all dead very
fast, much faster than even their growth curve. Microbes, and all
other living things, tend to do something else as well that inhibits
exponential growth. They produce waste products, and these
products are toxic to them. So in a monoculture—just one kind of
organism in a closed system—they not only rapidly deplete their
resources, but they equally rapidly poison themselves. Not exactly
sustainable growth.
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In an ecosystem there must not only be a constant supply of
energy coming in (sunlight, for example) that can become
nutrients, but you also need all the other feedback mechanisms of
biological supply and demand that convert one organism’s waste
products into another organism’s food, and often that food is the
secondary organism itself, but the higher up food chains one goes
the more complex interchanges take place before that next level
gets its essentials. Hence, there are far fewer bears, for example,
than beetles, not just in population numbers but also in total
biomass of the two organisms. But every system is still subject to
these feedback loops that only allow populations to reach a
replacement rate, although that replacement rate is further
complicated by local conditions, the arrival of new organisms and
the extinction of others. To their credit, today’s mandarins of
economics tell us that they are not completely unaware of these
added complications to the market mechanism.

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elsewhere)
ii) Another brief excursion in accelerating acceleration global free-
market capitalism
Having looked at some of the characteristics of the
dynamics of purely physical systems, that is, non-social realms
such as the classical physics of matter in motion, we can now use
some of these concepts to look for continuities, or discontinuities,
when these same explanations are applied to the social realms,
especially market economics. First a little disclaimer. In the next
few pages I hope to explain some basic operations of the systems
inherent in a market economy. This is the briefest of overviews,
and for those who are already informed in this area you may wish
to just skip ahead. This is a stage-setting background to illuminate
what we, in our life’s efforts, are really about, and it is not intended
as indictment of the current state of global capitalism, nor as a
precursor to a technical fix or any social policy agenda. Neither is it
a dire warning about the catastrophes that could be around the
corner in the global marketplace, or suggestions about how to

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avert them. Others have written with far greater scholarship on
these issues, some of which are in the notes section for this chapter.
The purpose of this particular overview of practical economics is
to illuminate the human activity of succumbing to the power of
surrogates and what personal responses to such an understanding
might bring.
As in all parts of this book, my primary audience, as I see
it, is the individual. And my purpose is to perhaps open ways for us
to see our individual lives as they are inevitably worked out in the
larger spheres of culture and history, to help provide catalysts for
asking ourselves the best questions possible, perhaps even helping
to foster the courage to ask those questions. It is with these
disclaimers (so as not to waste the time of those who know all this)
that I make the best descriptions I can of what our material
cultures are doing. The disclaimer also includes a ready admission
that I am not an expert. I have never had a single course in
economics! (Conversely, I have never failed a course in economics!)
And my complete ineptitude in matters of business and finance, if
measured by my own failure to accumulate wealth, could be used to

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elsewhere)
dismiss my understandings out of hand. So, with no credentials
and no reason why anyone should find authority in my own
financial success, I blithely plunge ahead. If you use my analysis
(somehow, I don’t know how) in your own investment strategy and
wind up broke, go ahead and sue me; you have my permission.
As it so happens, we have also depended upon the operation
of such mathematical relationships described above (all rates of
change, including exponential) in our economic systems, and not
just recently, but going back for many centuries. Let us start with a
really simple, homely example. Suppose you were a cobbler, and
you wanted to set up shop making shoes. However, you needed one
thousand dollars to build your shop and to get some tools and raw
material, and you don’t have a thousand dollars. Then you might
go to someone you knew, of good will, who believed that your
ambition and skills would indeed turn out to be a successful
enterprise making shoes for the local population. If this were a
family relative who were a smart businessman and also wished you
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well and could afford it, he might lend you those thousand dollars,
with a fixed surcharge of 10%, and a maturation of the loan of ten
years. What he is depending upon is that you will be able to make
good product, attract clientele, and turn a profit.
In this antiquarian reckoning, then, at the end of ten years
you, the cobbler, would pay back the principle and premium, or
$1,100 dollars. After all, you, the shoe maker, had the advantage of
the money up front, without which you could not enter the
threshold requirements of a business, and your lender gambled on
the outcome of your success (you might go bankrupt and leave him
in the lurch) and do without the use of that part of his money, in
exchange for which you paid a service fee of $100. Seems fair
enough, and in fact by any way of reckoning, considering the risk
and anxiety, a pretty good bargain. If all other things remained
equal (no inflation, etc.) the lender would have more money than he
started with by simply acting on faith that he would. And in fact, if
he lived to a ripe old age the lender would not just be $100 richer,
because when he got his principle and premium he would then have
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elsewhere)
more money to lend to another promising enterprise (or several)
and make even more money by successive lendings.
Now this might not seem to be a fast way to acquire more
wealth, simply by dint of the fact that you had some to start with,
and on scales of lending and return, with payment maturity times
like these. You would not be so much a wheeler-dealer as you are
simply performing a modest, local public service. The borrower in
such a parochial little setting is paying a fixed fee for the service of
time-sensitive, ready cash. The lender, providing he lives long
enough and no lending deals fall through, does actually experience
the relative advantage of an exponential growth function even if
he keeps doing the same thing, because on his next loan he can put
up $1,100 dollars and get ten percent on this, which is better than
he did before. His lending capital would increase slowly, but surely,
and his profit on each transaction would actually increase. But this
doesn’t amount to very much considering the natural life span of

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any individual. It really helps if he can make many such loans at
once.
Not only does he get more money for more loans, but the
occasional small business failure can be absorbed by the total of
profits. And if he wants to keep increasing the rate at which he
gets profits he will continually make the new accumulated capital
available for more loans. There are other ways to get more profit,
faster, and to reduce the inevitable out-of-pocket losses. First,
charge higher interest rates, then make the maturity dates come
faster. However, all of these variations on the theme of lending as
a way to make money, that is to make the very movement of money
a profit-producing “product” of its own right, have the value of
utilizing the magic of the exponential growth function available to
the lender (with each new transaction), but do not directly place
the burden of this exponential increase on individual borrower.
This burden shifts to the individual borrower when a loan is
not secured as a one-time proposition with a fixed fee, but when the
payment schedules of an individual loan are subdivided and the

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elsewhere)
premium turns into a time-dependent interest as the fee. Even if
the interest rate is contractually defined as fixed, the interest
accrues on remaining capital as a function of time. This is an
exponential function, even if that time-dependent rate is set at a
seemingly modest level. Again, in contemporary society we hardly
give this a second thought. Of course that is how things work!
That is how most of buy our essential automobiles. It is how home
mortgages work. And in a most exaggerated way, it is how credit
cards work.
I apologize to those readers for whom this example is not
just patently obvious, but seem to be uselessly antiquarian. To
bring us back to market economies, what does all this have to do
with money, producing and consuming, surrogate living, and
acceleration? Let’s just take it a step at a time. Obviously, from the
example above, the more money you can lend to more independent
shopkeepers, the closer you could come to actually making a useful
amount of money off the very fact that you have money to begin
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with, and that includes having enough loans out there and some
kind of risk evaluation such that one loan tanking doesn’t ruin
your profits. But what if someone comes up with a scheme that
requires so much capital expenditure that no one seems to have
enough, but which scheme forecasts to make enough profit that
within, say a decade, the profits would not only match the initial
capital investment but profits would be realized over that
investment. This predicament is the generative condition that
produced the idea of selling stock. And again, in its initial
conception it is very simple.
We know that the idea of selling stock in the capital
investment of an enterprise goes back to at least well into the
middle ages. A particularly illustrative example is provided by
historian Jean Gimpel in his book The Medieval Machine: the
industrial revolution of the middle ages. England and France saw an
explosion of mill works, both water and wind driven, during the
Middle Ages. The principal uses for these mills was to drive a few
simple machines, either grinding wheels to grind grains, or to
drive reciprocating hammers used in either metal fashioning or

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fulling, the latter a process to produce high-quality and high
density fabrics. It took considerable capital to put up a single mill,
let alone a mill-works of multiple mills, and it also required the
services of bona fide high tech specialists.
A grinding wheel consists of only two pieces, an upper and
lower stone of considerable weight. But to fashion such stones
required extreme expertise, especially in the carving of the curved
cutting ridges, as well as the fit and bonding of both stones, each
made of several large wedges. Specialists had to be called in to
dress the stones (restore the cutting edges) with regularity.
Similarly, the housing and gear-works were beyond mere
carpenters of stationary buildings. So, to erect the basic structure
was extremely capital-intensive, as well as buying access to water
source, making efficient roadways for raw goods producers to reach
the mill, etc.
The initial idea, then, is that an entrepreneur forms a
corporation of stockholders. If the total investment is to be fifty

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thousand pounds, for example, an extraordinary sum, you might
get a total of fifty wealthy landowners to jointly contribute one
thousand each, and what they would own, jointly, is the entire
enterprise. What they would annually receive is one fiftieth of the
total profits after operating expenses, including the people running
the mill and maintenance. If the mill’s profits were actually double
the initial capital investment plus operating costs over the course
of, say, ten years, then every shareholder would get their original
money back, in annual payments, in ten years. If they remained
shareholders for another ten years, all else being equal, they would
each be a thousand pounds richer. That is capital investment, and
return on capital. You wouldn’t invest more in acquisition of share
than you could afford to do without. That is, you don’t need that
money right now for household (or fiefdom) expenses, and if
things go bust (the mill burns down), that is the cost of your
wager.
But of course things never stayed that simple, not even in
the Middle Ages. First, let’s assume that the physical and economic
landscape remains fairly simple. Perhaps over the course of the

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aforementioned ten years the millworks, of which you own one-
tenth, has shown that it can produce not only regular returns on
the investment, but the infrastructure improvements your
corporation has made (improving roads to a wider population of
farms) has actually shown a rise in annual profits. Rather than just
stay with your steady, and steadily increasing income, perhaps you
decide to sell your investment papers (your one-tenth holding) to
someone else. You could show him the rising profitability of your
corporation, and reasons why this rise should keep rising. And the
demographic projection (people have to eat bread, there are more
raw goods being produced, perhaps prices for bread are rising)
could indicate that another person would not merely recoup his or
her own investment, but even more over a similar ten-year span.
If you sold your shares for your original investment, you
would have doubled your personal wealth at the sign of a pen! If
you could show your secondary purchaser a convincing rise in the
rate of return, maybe you could sell your original thousand pound
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investment for two thousand! Now you’re really rolling in pounds.
But such a sale, except to a rich idiot, would depend upon
convincing evidence that he was looking at a dependable trend line.
We need to take stock of what we are describing here. Even in this
uncomplicated, even primitive, example of capital investment, one
is actually making money on investment, not just by providing the
service of having money to loan at interest, but by betting on the
future.
And of course there are complications to consider even at
this meager level of investment sophistication. What if another
group constructs another mill in the same agricultural area? In a
static economy, that could cut your business in half, and your
profits even further since, even if you lay off some of your
employees, you wouldn’t likely half your operating costs. But we
are still in the range of fairly rudimentary arithmetic in all these
calculations. If you have a nice robust river rolling by, which
doesn’t show evidence of running too high or low, and other mills
passively dip their own single water wheels at its edge, along
property lines they control, well, that’s competition. It doesn’t

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really change the efficiency of your own mill, but it does introduce
other businesses vying for customers. So it would be nice if you
could get some sovereign authority to intervene and only allow so
many mills within a region that you could, with the available
transportation infrastructure, be a profitable service provider.
One can already see the possibility of the dilution of
profits, which would take a hit on the shareholders’ regular returns.
But in the secondary market, the person to whom you sold your
one-tenth share, things could be really ugly. This person has put
out twice the original share value, only to find out, to his chagrin
and anger, that with the construction of another mill too close by,
not only is he not getting a regular dividend, but he has just laid
out twenty thousand pounds for paper that he cannot turn around
and sell for a thousand pounds, because the future earnings
projection took a nosedive.
You may see all sorts of direct correlations to the present
already, but remember; so far we are talking about wheat or corn,

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in an insulated society with real boundaries for its goods, and no
foreseeable eclipsing technologies on the horizon for (in hindsight)
several more centuries. And even within this achingly primitive
scene there are further things that can cause incredible change.
The example of the robust river, with single water wheels dipped
in at its banks can still cause an arithmetic depreciation in the real,
on-the-ground capital investment, and at least a second order
problem for a secondary buyer of stock. Let’s try one more simple
adjustment (well within the technological paradigm of the 13th
century). Suppose that the new millwork is built off your property
(of course), and downstream. He will have access to the same river,
the same flow that you do, right? So, what’s the harm, except that
unless it is too many miles downstream he might overlap with your
customer base?
Just suppose that this new corporation wants to drive more
millwheels, with greater velocity, the combination of which (within
limits) are not additions to productive capacity, but multipliers.
How to do this? Build a dam. If the water is flowing down at a
particular grade, with a certain reliable input, and the alluvial

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geography is reasonably constant, everybody gets to dip in a
waterwheel. If you erect a dam, however, you can take the free
kinetic energy (of running water) that everyone has, and make a
lot of it occur at one place...at YOUR place. You can create an
artificial falls where much of the downward flow of water, rather
than occurring gradually over the stretch of the river, now is
concentrated in one location. You get to run mills at a great rate,
and a lot of them, through proper gearing and ganging of drives.
Meanwhile, you are not just competition for the millwork upstream
with hugely increased production efficiency, but you have killed
them off from any profit at all! Their waterwheels are now sitting
still in what has essentially become a reservoir. These one-time
barons of capitalism can’t even decide just to become a little “mom-
and-pop” shop for the really local customers who would like to be
able to walk their product to market. They can’t grind (or full, or
make horseshoes) AT ALL! And, surprise, this is exactly what did
happen. And it happened in around the year 1300! Yes, the free-
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running market releases more than productive capacity. The
multiplier effect of ever-increasing return on investment also
releases the ingenuities of destructive advantage.
We can further safely assume that the original stockholders
in these Medieval millworks were themselves wealthy landowners,
who got right to landownership because of family lines who,
somewhere back, simply took it over. Once they owned land, they
could then have farmers occupy it without owning it, planting
mostly what they were told, in exchange for the right to live,
literally. That meant shelter, the right to raise some of their own
food, and protection against the possibility that another landowner
or foreign prince would want to take over ownership by force. In
the feudal system there was little opportunity for someone who
already did not own land and the means to production to procure
it.
The ability for someone to simply own a chunk of the
earth, and thereby any resources, including human, which might
come from it (timber, ore, agriculture, and human productive

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power) simply because he was born to it has a depressing
arithmetic to it. If you place this system of ownership, where the
surface of the earth is a constant, but population grows
exponentially (for a while) the countervailing trend lines end up
looking like the aforementioned petri dish, with a few appointed
microbes inexorably sucking life itself from whatever is left. This
is why economic historian Robert Heilbroner, in his classic
textbook, The Worldly Philosophers, put both Thomas Malthus and
David Ricardo, two English economists (of course that term did
not yet apply as a profession, and Malthus was a parson) who
straddled the turning of the nineteenth century, together in a
single chapter entitled, “The gloomy presentiments of Parson
Malthus and David Ricardo.” The former saw the future of a
geometrically increasing population, tilling an arithmetically
increasing amount of land until it runs out (like the spreading of
the microbes across the petri dish) and the latter felt that simple
land ownership, and all that it implied, was completely contrary to

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innovation, the actual production of goods, and was essentially the
bane of any productive economic system.
iii) Uncle Hilding: my first introduction to market capitalism
The reader need not worry that, having taken so long with
the fourteenth century, that I will detail the succeeding centuries at
glacial pace. The reason for even giving this background is still in
the service of this section of the book, and that is understanding
the nature of the surrogates that we can unconsciously give our
lives over to, without asking, individually, at the level of
fundamental quantities and qualities, why it is we spend our
mortality doing what we do. It is to help understand both what we
do and what the nature of its attractions is. As I have already said,
it is not helpful to stop uncovering layers of meaning at the
obvious layer, namely that we are greedy creatures and want to be
“rich,” whatever that means.
Let me digress with a few anecdotes from my own years
growing up in New Jersey. As a kid, I might never have even heard

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the words “stock market,” if it were not for one of my favorite
relatives, my Uncle Hilding who was married to my Aunt Clara,
both of whom lived in an apartment in New York City. (In point of
fact, my Aunt Clara was not my aunt, but at least my great-aunt, or
something else.) My Uncle Hilding still had an accent, and not a
New York accent. He was perpetually of good cheer. Whenever
they drove out to see us, he always wore a three-piece suit, and he
loved to smoke cigars that smelled like burning chestnuts. He
didn’t wear a top hat or affect a cane or drive an expensive car, but
otherwise (I recognized later) he had a certain similarity to the
iconic character on the board game Monopoly. My Aunt Clara, on
the other hand, looked strikingly like the portrait of George
Washington that hung in all of our elementary school classrooms.
All the kids in my family agreed on this, and when first one of us
had the nerve to say it (not in Aunt Clara’s presence, of course) the
rest of us burst out laughing, like this was the most incredible
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In fact, to fully appreciate her aspect and mannerisms, my
Aunt Clara was twice the man that George Washington was. I feel
both giddy and guilty at revealing this to persons I don’t know,
(you know, a vestige of speaking ill of the dead). So, to assuage my
own conscience, I should also mention that once my wife and I
were walking down a street and went past a toy store window with
stuff on display. One of the things in the window was a “life-size”
figure of the Star Wars character Yoda (the little, smiling, alien
Zen-teacher, with bald head, huge eyes, pointy ears, and grey
elephantine skin), and my wife, reflexively and with no malice,
blurted out, “hey, he looks like you!” That unnerved me a bit, since
she meant it sincerely. She has since agreed to say (at my
prompting) that I look a little bit like actor Nicholas Cage, even
though I’ve been compared to all sorts of images that make me
wince, but never once has someone said of their own volition that I
looked like Nicholas Cage. And if it is difficult for you to see any
possible way to morph Yoda into Nicholas Cage, well I don’t blame
you.
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But I digress with my digression. The original digression
was my Uncle Hilding. I was told that he “made some money in the
stock market,” by purchasing, some time after the Depression,
some blue chip stocks, the only one of which I remember being
told about was General Motors. I don’t know what my Uncle
Hilding’s assets were; I don’t think they were huge, but when I
asked what he did, I would get some answer like, well he invests in
things, like the stock market. And we got some tangible things
from him. We didn’t see the two of them all that often, but when
they did visit, my parting with my Aunt Clara was a hug and kiss,
but my Uncle Hilding always insisted, with a huge grin, that you
shake his hand. For a while this confused me that he was so happy,
but insisted on shaking my hand. It didn’t take long to get. He
would always secretly press a dollar bill into my hand, and tell me
not to tell anyone about it. This obviously gave him great pleasure,
and it was almost always far greater than the sum total of coinage
that I would have at the time.

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We also, along the way, got two cars from Uncle Hilding
when he decided he didn’t need them any more, and it seemed like
our family could benefit. One was a 1946 Plymouth, very bulbous,
and which remained indelibly imprinted with the smell of cigars.
My sister used this when she got her driver’s license, and which,
when it didn’t run any more, we sold to a teenager who wanted to
fix it for $25, probably hoping to be a rebel without a cause. The
other was a Rambler Ambassador, six cylinders, column shift,
which my Dad used as his commute car, and which I was allowed to
drive when I got a license. I used to like to try to make the tires
“burn rubber,” which in fact I could only do by popping the clutch
when the car was on gravel. One day, coming back from my friend
Vinny’s, I left their driveway doing this, and the car made first a
big bang, and then the most miserable grinding noise. I was able to
nurse it home. Knowing I would be in huge trouble if I didn’t tell
my father that his car wasn’t exactly working, I did the George
Washington thing (probably because of my Aunt Clara’s family-
line connection) and told my father that something was very
wrong. Of course I added that I had no idea how it happened; it

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just happened. [So, Dad, this is a terrible thing to admit since
you’re no longer with us, but, the fact is, I broke your Rambler and
I knew it.] Okay, and while I’m at it, let me also confess that I was
also the reason why the Chevy you replaced it with suddenly
started burning oil one fine day, by seeing just how fast I could get
it to go in second gear. The answer, not that it matters anymore,
was ninety.
Anyway, the fact remained that even by the time I reached
high school, I had only the most primitive idea of what money was.
So far as I could tell, the most advanced financial instrument that
really mattered was called a family budget. This is what my father
did every few weeks when he sat down at his desk, paid the bills
with the checkbook, some envelopes, and a roll of stamps. I had
never written a check myself when I was a freshman in high
school, but I had seen my parents do it and that made sense. Family
finances, in my relatively carefree upbringing, was one of those
things that my parents never brought me into--that was part of

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what it meant to be an adult and a parent. I knew that money didn’t
grow on trees, but that it had to be managed. The closest thing to
being privy to the frustration of keeping a household budget was
when I would hear my father say, “Claire, there are three checks
that don’t have anything written down in the ledger. What were
they?”
I had understood that there was a thing called interest.
When I was about seven or eight my father took me to the bank
and we put several dollars into a savings account for me, and my
Dad told me that if I just left it there, the bank would pay me for
that. I thought that was magic, and it took some years for me to
understand that the reason they did that was because my couple of
dollars, along with everybody else’s money, meant that they could
let other people have big chunks of money, for adult things like a
house, and that they would charge them just a little more to have
that money when they needed it then they were paying me to be
able to use it. That made sense too; I could get that. And by the
time I was in was in high school I thought I understood how you
got money in the first place. My experiences thus far had been
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having a newspaper route for a while, and then jobs where people
would pay me to do things they didn’t want to do themselves, and
finally for a small business installing swimming pools, where I got
paid by the hour.
When you worked, it was definitely not this for this, but
this for that. When I weeded somebody’s garden, they didn’t then
come over and weed my father’s garden. I knew that because I did
that, too. Instead they paid me money. Money was definitely
connected with things like blisters for me, from ages twelve to
eighteen. My mother was a part-time nurse, and so she sold hours
of work as well. My father was a public school music teacher, and I
knew that they paid him for the year’s work, and that seemed to me
really high finance, but he also taught private music lessons in our
house, and that was most certainly hourly work because I would
see it happen right in front of me. My Dad gave a one-hour lesson,
and the student would hand him a five-dollar bill at the end.
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I had heard about the Great Depression, of course, since
my father and mother had lived through it. I couldn’t fathom how
or why this thing had happened, but for some reason everything
just sounded impossibly dreadful. My grandfather had lost his
factory job and had to go from house to house in his neighborhood
doing odd jobs for other families, and even with this experience, he
still maintained and passed on to my father, a heroic if antiquarian
notion of work, which I heard repeated by my dad on several
occasions “If you can get a good job working for a good company,
you just stay with it.” Even when I was growing up during the
post-war boom, my father saw this wasn’t something to be
implicitly trusted, considering that he had seen his own father
treated with abject disregard, for following the very advice he
ardently believed in. I think that, in this regard, my father saw
himself as somehow just a bit more sophisticated than his own
father, by being able to see a disconnect between cause and effect,
but it didn’t go much further than that. My father still believed in
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work, but there was that lurking suspicion that this was not the
same thing as the equivalent of a law of nature.
But back to my Uncle Hilding. When he passed away it was
determined that my Aunt Clara would move in with us. And the
closest approach I ever got to family finances was when I was told,
discretely by my mother, that we could not have moved into our
new house which would have enough room to accommodate Aunt
Clara had it not been for Uncle Hilding’s stocks. This was when I
was thirteen or fourteen, and now this thing, this investment that
my uncle had done, became something of interest to me personally.
And just as I had asked my mother what happened that made
people want to give presents half my lifetime earlier, I now asked
both my father and mother what these stocks were. What was up
with that?
I believe it was my father, this time, who explained stocks to
me, as much as he understood the concept. It went something like
this. If you wanted to start a factory, and you had a good idea but
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not much money, you might convince other people who did have
money to help put you in business. But rather than getting a loan,
like going to the bank (which I already understood), you would sell
them shares in your company, and then you don’t owe them money
because they are partners. What you do “share” with them is the
money you make, and those are the profits. So you all own the
company, not a bank, but the amount of money you get back is
divided up by everybody who helped put you in business.
So far I thought I got it, and I just kept that basic model in
mind. What I couldn’t figure right out as easily was why Uncle
Hilding’s stocks supposedly represented more money than he paid
in the first place. I figured that the profit you made was supposed
to be your little fraction of the profits. I could also understand that
your little monthly check didn’t have to add up to a constant
amount (which I thought was pretty good already), since if you
owned an itty bitty piece of General Motors, and that fraction
remained constant but the company grew, than your little payout
would also grow! Hooray! That seems really great. Everybody
wins.
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In my wildest imagination I could even vaguely see the
outlines of it being possible to have enough of these stock things
in a company like General Motors where you could make enough
money to live on without doing anything else. Not only would it be
possible for you not to have to build the cars yourself, but you
wouldn’t have to weed gardens, nurse, or teach music. Surely, I
thought, there must be an end to this! I mean, at the end of the day
surely somebody has to actually do something, right? And such a
figure who could make money without doing anything was a purely
imaginal creature. I could imagine being the little guy on the
Monopoly board, but I could also imagine being the king of Spain.
I also realized (overheard) that to get into our house my parents
weren’t using the monthly money they would have gotten as
shareholders of Amalgamated Widgets, but instead they had to
sell those shares. I had no idea who bought them. Perhaps
somebody else who figured they had a lot of time left on this earth
so that their little monthly checks, represented by little pieces of

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tailfins, would pay them back more than they had spent to get
them. In that case, I supposed it was okay.
When I had asked my father what stocks and the stock
market were, I don’t think he was just watering down his
sophistication to match my age. I honestly think that this was as
close as he could come to understanding the beast. If I had asked
him if he were in any way connected with the stock market, I’m
pretty sure he would have said, “absolutely not.” And when I heard
again about the stock market crash of 1929 in my American
history class in the tenth grade, I didn’t feel like I understood
anything any better, but rather only worse. I heard the teacher
explain that “investors were speculating, betting on the market, but
when that market turned down everybody tried to get out, and it
just crashed.” My memory isn’t all that good at remembering
things that I want to remember, when I want to remember them. It
comes up with all sorts of stuff I don’t ask for at the oddest times.
And so I wouldn’t like to say that I remember that this is the exact
wording that my American history teacher used. But as I try to
reconstruct the classroom, I think I probably have it close to the

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way it went. Speculation. Way out of control. Spending money
they didn’t have. Everybody tried to get out, but the whole thing
crashed and (the most memorable part of the disquisition) people
jumped out of windows.
iv) Why do people jump out of windows?
Of course in the tenth grade, that image stuck, and this was
the next time, since our Aunt Clara moved in, that I felt some there
was a real discontinuity between how the world worked and how I
experienced it that I should be able to understand. People actually
DID jump out of windows. I really spent some time trying to
figure that out. What would ever make somebody, a real person,
jump out of a window? I couldn’t get there from where I was. The
closest I could come was if someone were trapped in a building,
and there were a fire raging behind them, and there were no other
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way out but to jump. It terrified me to think that way, but I actually
tried to imagine if I would have the nerve to ever jump out of a
window, even if there were a fire behind me. I really wasn’t sure if,
in that final moment, that the mere thought of a terrible fall, and
the absolutely minuscule chance that I might somehow survive it,
would not drive me back into the building where I knew I would
die but at least I wouldn’t have to fall. Why would anyone, ever,
jump out of a window when there wasn’t certain death waiting if
he or she did not jump? I was completely mystified. And somehow
it was connected with this thing called a stock market, which now I
was certain was beyond understanding.
The more I asked, the less satisfactory were the answers.
Now, one more time, what were these people doing? The way I
figured it, as a young teenager, if you owed somebody something,
of course you had to pay them. I didn’t know what bankruptcy
meant, and I suppose that I figured that if you owed somebody
money and refused to pay (or couldn’t pay) that you would go to
jail. I didn’t know that there weren’t such things as “debtor’s
prisons” in modern society, and I didn’t know enough history to

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even know the term. If I had known that there was not a debtor’s
prison, it would have made my confusion even more intense. Why
jump? If you lost all your money, well, that’s tough all right, but
then you just start over again and go back to work and make some
more, right? I probably heard something like, “people were
spending money and investing money that they didn’t actually
have.” First of all, how do you do that?
The closest I could come was from seeing episodes of “The
Untouchables,” on television. My brother Brian loved that show
(my Dad, by the way, hated it, and whenever he caught us watching
it he would make us shut it off) and Elliot Ness was always
breaking into some place or other bringing someone to justice.
Once in a while it involved some appropriately evil person who
would loan somebody money, in a very bad way. When that person
couldn’t pay up, they would send some goons around and actually
break the guy’s leg, or threaten to kill him. That was the sort of
motive that made sense, even if just a little, that could make
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somebody want to jump out of a window. But of course, that kind
of thing was illegal, which is why Mr. Ness was always trying to
break up those rackets and send the perpetrators to jail. I couldn’t
in any way figure out what it was that these investors did, by 1929,
which was legal, and which could possibly make them want to jump
to their deaths.
By the time I graduated high school, I still didn’t know, and
I just figured out that whatever finance and investment and stocks
were about, which I lumped under the term “economics,” it was not
only beyond me, but it was beyond me in a way that made me
decide I would never be interested in it. So I never took a course in
it. Long after I had begun studying physics in earnest, and I could
do the math to find the rate of change of almost anything, and
even could recognize math functions that at times don’t have a
derivative (they are not well-behaved, in the parlance) I still had no
idea what anyone was talking about whenever I heard a few
seconds of the goings on in Wall Street that day. As far as I was
concerned, the whole thing might be from another planet, but it
was also the sort of thing that if I were to explore another planet I
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wouldn’t want to stick around to figure it out. It would be far less
interesting and informative than watching someone collect stamps.
What, after all, were these people betting against? Wasn’t it
illegal to bet anyway, excepting in Nevada? The first time I heard
about the futures market, I think I must have laughed. What IS a
porkbelly, anyway, and who would want one, except for the original
pig? And if you bought a bunch of them, where on earth would
you put them? Needless to say it came as something of a shock
when I finally put a few derivatives together and got some inkling
of what was going on, and why the news wouldn’t let go of it, and
why everybody seemed to think--automatically--that virtually
anything that happened or threatened to happen in the world of
investment was, de facto, of greater importance than anything else
in the world with the possible exception of war, and perhaps the
really bad thing about war (unless you’re in one) is that it can mess
up investments. I still couldn’t quite figure out why anyone would
jump out of a window over it, but I was getting closer.

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I know this must seem impossibly tedious to most anyone
who already knows these things, and so I have tried to make my
own incredibly torturous and boneheaded awakening to these ideas
the story line, rather than simply explaining economics. And I
promise that I am not toying with you, the reader. Yes, I am also
having fun as I write this, and certain juxtapositionings of
meaning and turns of phrase make me laugh, and I hope it makes
the reading more enjoyable, rather than annoying. But the essence
of the things I am trying to understand, the places these
reflections go, have taken my whole life. So it may come as no
surprise for me to admit that I am not an exceptionally quick study.
Instead, things tend to hang around in my head, and in my
journals. Beyond that, who can say? So with your indulgence and
good humor, I’ll continue for a bit, trying to figure out why anyone
would leap from a window, and see if we can’t actually find some
wisdom patterns that bring together these ruminations on
surrogates, economics, and acceleration, and if it turns out as I
hope, we will leave this part of the conversation with deeper
gratitude, and also some more ideas to explore.

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We have one example of why one might jump, admittedly
from a highly crafted and sentimental film. It’s A Wonderful Life has,
in recent years eclipsed the traditional seasonal favorite movie
ritual, A Christmas Carol. You have most likely seen it. This Frank
Capra movie was made in 1946, and the central character, George
Bailey, is played by Jimmy Stewart. We are given a brief biography
of George, who grew up in a little Norman Rockwell town and had
great hopes for the adventurous life of exotic travel. But while
everyone else seems to move on and “make a name for themselves”
in the whirlwind world of possibility, George stays behind. His
brother returns from WWII a decorated hero, and a friend
becomes a mover and shaker in the big city. George runs the
savings and loan his father started, settles down and has a family,
and lives in a house once ramshackle and abandoned which the
Baileys have fixed up, though it still carries the reminders of its
humble past.
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George is an excellent fellow. He’s honest and charitable.
Whenever a new family is able to move into their own home thanks
to the savings and loan, he holds a little celebration for them. We
know that the entire village is so much the better for George Bailey
ever having lived in it, but he seems to miss the picture. He keeps
his travel suitcase packed for some time, thinking that anytime he
will sprout wings and experience the world, but duty always calls
him back. He would likely have just gone on doing what he has
always done, and one would hope that at sometime, perhaps in old
age, he would have the time to appreciate his own life’s fullness. But
life (or at least the director) has something else in mind.
The archenemy of George Bailey’s low-intensity goodness
is the evil Mr. Potter, unflinchingly played by Lionel Barrymore,
and he wants to buy Bailey out. The bait he uses is a fat salary,
business work that is more high-flying and not tied up in the
niggling details of trying to help out individual people. And the
kicker was that this opulence might also allow George to travel and
see the world. George nearly falls for this; the childhood dreams
are held out as reality and, for a moment, he becomes transfixed.

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But at the last instant catches himself and repudiates the whole
deal.
The little savings and loan had even survived a run on the
bank when George Bailey, personally, describes the banking system
to a bunch of panicky townspeople that the bank doesn’t actually
keep all the cash in boxes that they have put in their savings, but
rather uses it to help other people do things like get their
mortgages, people they know, folks right there in the room. To
meet their household needs he takes the cash they do have, and
asks each neighbor, in the presence of the other, how much they
actually need right then to meet expenses and doles it out. They
make it to closing time, having averted the riot, satisfied people’s
needs, and taught them all a lesson in simple financial capitalism
along the way. The clock reaches closing time, with George Bailey
holding on to the last dollar bill they have!
That was a close one, and it might have seen its resolution if
not for a crucial mistake by the hapless Uncle Billy, who manages
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to leave a big portion of their cash assets in Mr. Potter’s office
when he dropped by just to get in a few bragging rights for the
good guys. It was Christmas Eve and they were still around, not
engulfed by the tentacles of the Potter octopus. Potter gets the
cash, realizes what it means, and decides to come in for the kill. He
threatens George that he will spread word of malfeasance at the
savings and loan, which will put them out of business once and for
all, and Potter won’t even have to bribe George with a fat cat job!
George Bailey is faced with an existential crisis.
As soon as Uncle Billy realizes he has lost their assets,
George goes over the top. What does everything add up to? He has
lost his senses in the immediacy of the moment, and so he can’t
construct any reasonable narrative for what his life really means. In
short, he is in a panic. And that is the nature of panic or acute
anxiety. It completely distorts the world and one’s place in it. You
focus on futures over which you feel you have no control, and the
past tends to evaporate. The epicenter of the huge distortion is an
impossibly compressed present. George is truly out of his mind he
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destroyed, and he imagines, already, that he will be seen as having
betrayed real people, the people he lives with and knows face to
face, and embraced. And that is why George jumps out the window.
Actually, if he jumped out the window of the little savings and
loan, he would have fallen about two feet, so he jumps off a bridge
into freezing water hoping to end it all.
Now, the dramatic tension arises as we watch this because
we know it is wrong. It isn’t just wrong that anyone should commit
suicide, but even in this wildly skewed world George is tumbling
through, we know that everything is not as it seems. It isn’t just
that there was foul play. We have had the benefit of seeing
George’s entire life in a short time, and we haven’t forgotten all the
good he has done, and the good person he simply is. If only he
could just see what we do, then he wouldn’t jump. We see the
narrative, and he has lost it. There is more to this tale than just a
heart-warming message of reassurance. The pain for George is
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among the very people he has lived with, and he, in his panic,
imagines that they will find him contemptible. We ache to give him
a little distance, to give him a little vision and a voice. If he could
just bring himself to sit down with his family and explain why he
feels the world is falling apart, certainly they could expand his
vision. But he doesn’t. He can’t hear anything or anybody, and like
an explosive dervish lashes out at everything on his way to end it
all.
What Capra has done here is to spin a little tale of
twentieth century capitalism in a setting very close to the Pastoral
Ideal. When the connections are close enough, and people seem to
get the patterns of each other’s lives, then commerce isn’t simply
an exchange of this for that. Commerce is part of a conversation of
lives, where half of the vocabulary is what you do and half is who
you are. To live in a community like this, and then to imagine that
this life-long conversation could be erased or subverted, is indeed a
threat to one’s meaning. George is delusional, but the fuel for his
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George wants to jump; we just wish he wouldn’t do it. We also
know that if he could fix his vision, he would not commit suicide.
Luckily for George, there is a divine intervention, by way
of a wonderfully hapless angel named Clarence, and George gets
the vision he needs. And once he gets his vision, he embraces life
and everyone in it. Yes, they are financially saved at the end, but to
watch the film more than once, you know that this isn’t George’s
epiphany at all; it is just a little tidying-up coda. Because his real
thrill comes when he rediscovers his meaning, and he still has no
idea if the financial problem will be fixed. It would be nice if it did,
but he isn’t remotely thinking of that when he bursts through the
door of his home and gathers everyone up in his arms in the
penultimate scene. And it definitely isn’t the literal meaning when,
in this magnificent scene where everyone is gathered, his own
brother, the celebrity gives a toast “To my brother, George. The
richest man in town.”

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Here’s the point. The first time I saw that movie, it made
sense to me. I could understand why George felt he couldn’t bear
living one minute longer. Going back to my tenth grade history
class, if the teacher had told us that hundreds of little bankers in
towns like Capra’s Bedford Falls had jumped out of their windows
in a stock market crash, I think I would have understood that, even
at age fifteen. In point of fact, I don’t know how many financiers
jumped from high office buildings in New York City in 1929, and I
don’t know who they were. But if there were any, I couldn’t make
any logical leap myself to figure out what was so devastating that
they couldn’t go on living. It didn’t make sense, and it would
continue a mystery to me for many years to come.
Of course, even in 1946 Frank Capra’s movie was already
more of a historical tale, and an imaginary one at that, than a
representation of how a market economy actually works. In order
for it to have its emotional pull, it required that the principle
players personally know each other, and the script even had its
equivalent of the pastoral ideal’s curmudgeonly, outsider, voting
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his bank account. That was Mr. Potter. He was willing to, in petri
dish fashion, grow on the resources of the town with no regard for
the fact that he was also poisoning the petri dish. He was
depending on the fact that, so long as there were others living in
the same geographical area (Bedford Falls) whose tolerance for a
lower quality of life was reached before his (namely, he could
insulate himself from the meaner aspects of life with money), then
those other people would also see to cleaning up the mess without
him. Or, in the words of Leona Helmsley, “the little people pay the
taxes.” Mr. Potter had long ago figured out that, by his reckoning,
he didn’t have to curry good favor of anyone, and he could live
without the very things whose imagined loss drove George Bailey
over the edge, namely community, friendship, and trust.
I continued to be confused by many such things through
college and beyond; by the things adults apparently did in a world
of high finance where I could find no correlate to my personal life.
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teaching assistant in the physics department. I was making a little
more than four dollars per hour, which was, I think, about double
the minimum wage at the time. I shared a rented basement with
five other guys, which was very cramped but we got along pretty
well. I think our rent started out at twenty-five dollars a month, for
a total of one hundred and fifty for the basement, utilities included.
I wasn’t making enough money to save anything, and I had a
student loan at a fixed rate, but things seemed pretty good to me,
and sustainable. Even the luxuries, like going on dates, were pretty
affordable since most things you could do on campus were gauged
to student budgets.
Of course, if one of us wanted to make a quantum leap in
living, like starting a family or getting a house, the current
conditions couldn’t prevail. But that was what graduation was
supposed to be about. Hopefully you could get a job that wasn’t
hourly wage, and you would have a discontinuous change to an
adult life. Such personal-narrative discontinuities seemed natural to
expect, since they had biological correlates, like going through
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stamped on the way toward being able to act in the adult world,
and my union card just happened to be getting a college degree.
When I would occasionally hear things like the economy
needs to be growing, or how terrible it was when standards of
living were not increasing enough, or were even flat, I was
perplexed. I was thinking like a physics student, at best, and I
couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They weren’t talking
about steady-state growth, but growth on growth. First of all,
everyone was saying that you couldn’t go on having exponential
population growth, no matter how big a sphere you’re planning to
put them on. As long as the surface area was fixed, like a petri dish,
the trend lines of available nutrients, area, and waste products
would eventually (make that rapidly) converge. It didn’t matter if
at the time one-tenth of the world’s population was industrialized,
or if there were parts of the Savannah sparsely populated. In
physics I was quite used to extrapolating mathematical functions,
and in some areas of physics, like cosmology, you could often figure
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that your theory was converging on something like reality if your
predictions came out to “within an order of magnitude,” meaning a
power of ten.
So the economics problem, as I saw it, was completely
incoherent. The insistent calls for an economy to grow, and not
grow at a fixed dollar rate but at an exponential rate, in order for it
to be considered stable and healthy were simply non sequiturs. I
figured that these folks who made these calls were obviously
smarter than I was. This simply had to be the case because they
were saying these things, getting paid smartly to say them, and I
couldn’t make sense of it. Furthermore, I could never get a fix on
the terms they used, things ranging from the stock market, to
securities, futures, and commodities markets.
I originally came up with two ideas that I tried to make do
to tell me that I wasn’t crazy or just as dumb as a piece of shale,
and allow me to put this economics thing away and say, “okay, I get
it so all is well.” One was, well the population is, in fact, growing. If
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geometric rate, then I can see how you can continue the trend line
of economic growth for a lot longer, meaning there are more
people who need (in an ideal world without extreme privation)
basic stuff, and that means more production, so I guess that could
turn out to mean more nodes of production and exchange and
people have a slowly increasing standard of living. Of course even
this had a limit. And, knowing something about the actual living
conditions of most of the world’s population, even arithmetic
growth for everyone seemed somewhat embarrassing as the
overarching explanation. It is not sustainable. What was I missing?
Then I came up with one other idea which I understood and
could even count up as a good thing for increasing standards of
living in the abstract, and that was the positive discontinuity
caused by innovation. And to make this comprehensible to my
limited brain, I had to posit a closed society as a microcosm of
what is ultimately a closed world. This is how I was trained to
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differently we thought about the real world from, say, engineers or
technicians. There is a meeting convened, the purpose of which is
to come up with a better automatic milking machine for dairy
farmers. First a technician gives a presentation, complete with a
working prototype, and a process that accommodates how cows
actually behave, and is reliable. The engineer produces a more
theoretical model, which requires all sorts of throughputs for all
dairy operations, and doesn’t have all that much to do with an
individual farmer and a typical cow. Then the physicist addresses
the audience, by saying, “Imagine a spherical cow.”
So I asked myself to consider not why, but how an economy
could grow (since we are told this is essential for a market economy
to be functioning) and not quickly transcend the physical
constraints of a petri dish. I mean, how many shoes does anybody
need (excepting, of course Imelda Marcos)? How many cars can
you drive at once? And the thought occurred to me, well, what
happens when you innovate? For example, in the age of radio, how
many radios can you put in a home before they become absolutely
redundant, even with every member of the household listening to a

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different radio program at the same time? Well, not many. Now
introduce into that picture the first televisions, and what happens?
Well, the most obvious thing is that this new device is not a radio,
so you can sell them as well as radios, and no one could think that
they needed or wanted a television until there was a television to
be wanted. And even in this little example I could see, for a limited
time, several kinds of exponential economic growth.
First of all, it was very much like inoculating the petri dish
with a few bacteria. For a certain amount of time you will actually
see something like an exponential growth in bacteria. Secondly,
there was an incalculable discontinuity that would last even shorter
than the simple growth in amount, and which could for that very
short time (it is really just a brief spike, not so much a curve) even
dwarf the economic return based on growth of number of
televisions sold. This was a function of sheer novelty. In the age of
radio only, there was nothing at all like the instantaneous
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realm. And so for a short time, there is an experience of extreme
excitement, for technologists, for the creative groups using this
new medium, for the public, for sociologists, and for investors.
Among all the groups represented above, it is only the investors
who have anything to actually lose. If this new technology falls
flat, the public does something else or what it did before, the
creative people had already come from other creative professions
that still existed, the sociologists would have just as interesting a
cultural question figuring out what actually did happen. For the
investors, this was truly exciting, as long as you define excitement
in non-valuative terms. If they lost out, well that has an adrenaline
rush to it. But on the upside, if they won out this new invention
was so different that there wasn’t even a way to value it yet! There
was almost no way to put an upper limit on the rate of return
possible because it couldn’t be compared to anything in existence.
Just what premium would consumers pay to have the magic
of the visual and audio of world events, sports, live stage of any
sort immediately available in their homes? No one knew. And what
I am going to suggest here is that even in this industry—which has

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so centrally defined our society of the last half-century and which
it is so easy to vilify—even in this industry there are at least some
elements of capitalism that are consonant with certain versions of
capitalism played out within the pastoral ideal. Certainly not the
scale and scope. And the idea that we are somehow a national
village because we sequester ourselves away around our new
technological fireplace of storytelling, the cathode ray tube, and
imagine that millions of us are watching the same sitcom together
and that makes us a virtual clan is an example of surrogacy closer
to a consensual national psychosis than a community.
No, the way it has even a strand of aspect of the pastoral
ideal of commerce is that it at least incorporates a version of real
risk of real capital in a direct investment of a specific “this for
that” transaction. Doubtlessly, this is not how the actual venture
capitalism came into the creation of a multi-layered television
industry, but it at least had the possibility to have arisen that way.
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infrastructure, the organization of content providers, and the
assembly of televisions in factories, all this could at least
potentially have arisen along the same lines as the medieval mill-
works. In other words, a large number of investors are asked to
purchase shares in different parts of this unfolding experiment,
and they then hold on to those shares. It might take a number of
years before the investment begins to have any sort of operating
profit, and there is even the risk that it will not catch on at all, in
which case the shareholder is left with a worthless certificate. If
the medium does catch on, and begins running in the black, you
will start to get premiums on your shares. And if the momentum
picks up, your premiums might cover your initial investment in,
say, ten years, and thereafter not just continue with no further risk
investment but also even increase steeply if the new idea really
takes off. You could even become quite wealthy just by your
monthly profits on original shares.
This is the model of capitalism, to the extent we were told
anything about it in our high school history classes, that we were
told was the signature of free markets. Yep, even I could get that
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much. It seemed pretty close to making wealth from nothing, but
there was, after all, a prime mover behind such a financial
discontinuity somebody invented something no one had ever
thought of before. The arrival of a truly novel idea is itself
unpredictable and discontinuous, so it was not incomprehensible
that it would produce discontinuous economic rewards for those
who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
We have always valued truly discontinuous innovation
within market capitalism, and even embraced it as a force to remake
our world for the better well back into the period when the
pastoral ideal was considered a real-world model for an indefinite
future. One of our earliest federal institutions was the Patent
Office, whose premise is that the introduction of a truly novel idea
is so life-giving to the greater public welfare, and the economic
risks to bring it into being were so great, that an inventor ought to
be able to count on a certain amount of time by which to benefit,
which was, the last I checked, for seven years and renewable once.
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Someone else merely duplicating your invention, without your
permission, could be legally forced to cease and desist, and even
pay reparations. But after a fixed number of years that idea passes
into the public domain, and the field of competition in production
is open.
A corollary to this, of course, is copyright law which
originally sought the same sort of protection for other less
tangible things, like literature, but which later came to subsume
such things as trademarks, so as to protect a manufacturer who had
gained respect in the marketplace for quality (that is, trust) from
having someone else producing knock-offs, unfairly benefiting from
your hard-won reputation for value and at the same time diluting
your reputation. Anyone who claims that discontinuities and
uncertainties are unhealthy for a properly operating free market is
either lying through their teeth, or is simply ignorant of history.
Discontinuity is the very bedrock of capitalism. And yet the “evils
of uncertainty” for market capitalism are precisely what we hear,
from every economist and analyst, absolutely without contrary
opinion. What could they possibly be talking about?

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As many readers already know, and may be wondering just
how long I could remain so dense and naive, the reason why
uncertainty is postulated as bad for an economy, and especially
toxic to a global market economy, is because the simple idea of
stockholder risk and reward, dating at least to the Middle Ages, is
not how we expect our individual and national net worth to
increase. The real money is not made in holding stocks through old
age. The real money comes from selling stocks long before any
share-profit from production would ever matter. And what you are
then betting on is that the next buyer will see in your portion of
the corporation not continued profit, nor even increasing profit, but
an increasing rate of rate of profit. You are counting on this
person being there at some crucial time, so that you can make a
really big profit, really fast. Again, this is not a profit on fixed
value. It is not even a profit on growth of value. It is a profit based
not only upon your projection of the future of your company, but
on the PERCEPTION of the FUTURE at some FUTURE time,

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by someone who hasn’t yet arrived on the scene. That is your bet.
You hope that such a person will be there. If it so happens that
such a person does arrive and you recognize it and can sell at a
wonderful multiple, and then PERCEPTIONS about the FUTURE
after that sale happen to change and your buyer looses out big time,
that is not your problem.
A year or two ago we, the general public that reads the
news, were introduced to what was for many a new term in finance
the derivatives market. In interviews, even on public radio which
doesn’t have to abide by the dictum of sound bites, when analysts
were asked to explain what these things were, the most common
answer was that this was a rather arcane instrument based upon
mathematics that most of us probably couldn’t understand (and
that is usually explained away by saying that the decisions lay in
some incredibly complex computer program), but it was risky and
we shouldn’t worry too much about it since the economy’s
exposure to derivatives was relatively small. Sorry to be so blunt,
but that is once again either ignorance or lying. The fact is that
ALL financial instruments are derivatives. They all hinge on not

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just change, but increasing rates of change over time. The first
derivative of displacement with respect to time is called speed, or
velocity. The second derivative, if it exists, is acceleration. The
third derivative, if that exists in a physical system, is jerk! We now
have financial instruments that are so far removed from anything
like a produced thing of value for an actual person who might buy
it, that the current formulas for accruing wealth are not just
derivatives, but second-order, third-order, or fourth-order
derivatives. Indeed, for global markets to continue to grow (not
just make a profit) it is essential that every economy has a steady
supply of jerks.
So, why is growth so important? Why can’t we just get
sustainable and be about other things, like creating community,
probing the arts and sciences for insights into deep and satisfying
questions, good conversation? And remember, we are not talking
about arithmetic growth in goods and services, which of itself
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by itself. No. We are talking about growth compounded, that is,
growth on the rate of growth. There is only one mathematical
relationship that, no matter how many times you take its derivative
keeps yielding a positive number, and that is exponential growth.
Any exponential growth will explode toward infinity, so the
mandarins of economics tell us that we would like to keep that
growth EXPONENT sufficiently small so that at least we might be
able to live out our current mortalities before the petri dish culture
implodes in EVERY way.
How is it possible? Well, in fact, there are several
mechanisms by which one could convince oneself that this is
possible, but to have any knowledge of simple math and physical
reality, you can only indulge in this fantasy by staying sufficiently
removed from physical reality. That is, you can only be in the
business of moving money that you never see to actually believe
this might be possible. But first, one more homely example.

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Some time ago I heard about a local business that had just
started up. In fact, I had even seen their corrugated steel
warehouse that was their business. I was immediately thrilled by
the sight of this little, scrappy upstart because they were going to
make and sell electric vehicles. I went for a visit one day, partly
because gadgets have always fascinated me, but mainly because I
had an idea of my own that I wanted to talk about with their chief
engineer. This place was small enough, perhaps twenty people in
all, that I could actually do that. While I was waiting in this
marvelous, makeshift office (kind of like a big garage), there was a
lot of energy and eccentricity. I asked where the restroom was and
on my way down the hall was nearly run over by a nerdy guy
racing around on an electric scooter. This was a company of an
odd collection of whiz kids and aging hippies. And they just might,
by dint of innovation and hard work, change the landscape
(commercial and environmental) for the better. I was already in
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While I was waiting, I couldn’t help but notice that the two
phones were continually ringing, and the two people at the phones
were taking down names and addresses and giving brief synopses
of the business at a furious pace. I asked what the activity was all
about, and they said they were halfway through making an initial
public offering of stock! My pulse immediately quickened. How do
you get this stock, I asked? Well, they had a little promotional
packet, which is what they were answering the phones about; they
were sending out these packets to people who had heard about
them. I took a packet home. I told my wife about the experience,
and my excitement was more than evident. By this time in my life I
had taken to listening to economics forums on occasion to try to
immerse myself in this great economic enterprise to see if I could
figure it out. I knew some more terms and could do a pretty fair job
imitating catch phrases that were the sage advice of professional
investors. I also liked reading Business Week to see what was going
on, mostly as a fascinating window on contemporary
entrepreneurial society.
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Still operating basically from my original understanding of
what stocks actually meant and why they were sold (to build an
infrastructure to do something novel), this seemed like the most
amazing personal opportunity. This was dynamic capitalism within
the Pastoral Ideal! This was a little local company. I could meet all
the employees face to face. Hopefully, they would expand and make
a thriving business and create some more local jobs. For a person
to buy a single company’s stock, I knew from reading and listening
to financial gurus of national reputation, you should know
something about the company and be personally interested in what
they do. Was I ever! If I wanted to, I could not only understand the
financial statements of a company this size, but I could read the
schematics of the electronics involved and build one of their
gadgets myself !
It was local. It was a raw innovation. And it was a product
that I viewed as an unalloyed good thing! Sign me up. I know
exactly what this means. I’m helping you out to do this thing by
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risking my money, and it is very risky indeed. I know I can’t invest
more money than I am able to lose, and I have to be ready to lose it
all. But that is okay. I BELIEVE in what you people are doing, and
if you fail, well, that is a noble thing anyway. I honestly won’t
mind. This was the first time I had ever encountered something
that was so direct, met all my fundamentals, and it was market
capitalism on a community level. Finally, I would get to participate
in this thing called investment, and it would be involved in
something I could get my mind around and I believed should
happen.
The investor’s brief I read was kind of dense, and I
expected that, full of a lot of “party of the second part” legalese.
My enthusiasm started to wane the more I read, but I desperately
wanted the basic vision to stay intact. The smallest amount you
could invest was $500, and we could afford that, and it also seemed
like the perfect amount so as not to overwhelm the company with
meaningless bookkeeping, but was small enough that they really
WERE asking for the community to invest, and not just billionaire
venture capitalists. So far, so good. Then I got to the part about

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fixed conditions of how much the company president and chief
engineer would retain in total stock ownership. Hmm. Well, okay, I
guess that’s their right, but this is starting to sound less like the
original stock as I had hoped to understand it. This wasn’t just
operating profits and patent protection on a good idea, but
something more. I was starting to feel less comfortable that this
actually was a bold risk for a good thing, all happening within
Bedford Falls.
Then I got to a truly surprising part of the prospectus,
somewhere around page sixteen. It was a little section called
“Dilution of Shares.” I had to read this over and over because I had
never heard of anything like this before, not in Business Week or
anywhere else. It seemed that if I were to invest five hundred
dollars to help them out, knowing I might just lose the whole
thing, as soon as I purchased those shares they were going to write
down my investment at, as I recall it, a four to one ratio. This
company was going to take 80% of our money and just say thanks.
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What? I went over it and over it, and it kept coming out the same.
This wasn’t risk; it was charity, and I think charity is great as long
as I know that that is what it is. And I think that charity by itself is
a wonderful thing, giving without any hope of monetary return.
But this was even worse than a scam-charity, where you give
money to help some cause in need and find out that most of it is
going to well-to-do administrators, and only ten percent actually
helps the needy. That ten percent, at least, accomplished something
good, which is why you gave in the first place.
My wife and I were willing to invest our little piece of
capital in the American dream and root for the home team, until I
got to this part of the document. As best I could tell, if I gave this
company $500, they would instantaneously simply remove $400
dollars from that amount, and give me a certificate that said I now
owned $100 dollars of stock (whatever that represented in terms of
a fraction of the company), and still that measly $100 was now
completely at risk the same way any stock is, particularly in a start-
up business. This, obviously, must be a mistake. Who would do
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I could talk to, do that to some other local person whom they
would have to live with, at least potentially seeing me in the
supermarket? All sorts of people do all sorts of things to people
they don’t know, and for whom they have a reasonable hope of
remaining anonymous, like running a criminal phone marketing
scam from another country for medical insurance that doesn’t
exist.
My wife and I had a meeting with the marketing guy, who
was more than glad to set up a time for us to talk in person. After
all, this was a small, community-based company. And this fellow
was another aging hippie, homegrown, and ready to do the right
thing with capitalism by being involved with this little company.
He was very nice, explained their plans, how they believed in their
product, the virtues of localism, and that any startup was a risk
and we shouldn’t invest any more money than was within our
budget. Well, I already understood this part very well, which is
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blush, seemed to be a version of capitalism that I actually could
make sense of as a social virtue. I was fully prepared to lose five
hundred dollars in a risk, knowing that I would feel it was a heroic
bet on the future, a better future.
So we let him go on for a little while, just the three of us
sitting at a table. And then I asked him about this “dilution of
stock” detail, which was definitely well within the document, not
part of the lead-in description of the venture. At first, he simply
agreed that this was in fact part of the business structure of their
public offering. So, I wasn’t wrong after all. I started to get bolder,
and a little more annoyed, since I had the prospectus right in front
of me, and put it in the most transparent terms I could, waiting for
him to tell me that, somehow, I was wrong.
Finally, I said, “as far as I can tell, if we invest $500 dollars,
you will immediately subtract $400 from that and give me a paper
that says I have $100 dollars invested. This money actually
disappears! You are asking me for a $400 dollar fee for the privilege
of saying that I am completely risking $100. Is that right? Risk is

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one thing. This isn’t risk. You are simply going to take that money,
and for all I know what you and the other folks around here are
going to do with it is use my $400 to buy more of your own stock,
which will not only be at face value but discounted, and with no
80% ‘fee’ attached. Or you could all just go out and buy a yacht.”
He didn’t have any direct answer, except to reiterate that, yes, I had
read the document correctly and wasn’t I a smart fellow for going
through all that technical and legal prose. Yep, I was a careful and
informed investor! And once again, they (the company) wanted us
to know that this was indeed a risk, and no one should invest more
than they could afford.
This was so friendly, and after all these were just numbers
and technical legal language. This was nothing so blatant as
building a dam downstream from my mill, an actual fact on the
physical landscape. I am usually very good about keeping my anger
in check, and I succeeded this time as well. But I can’t say that I
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didn’t have a brief flash of an alternative response besides just
leaving the meeting cordially.
Well, we left and didn’t invest any money at all. And my
disappointment was manifold. I had been excited thinking that I
was going to get to participate in this thing called investment, and
here seemed to be an example, finally, right here in my own
backyard, of market capitalism which had every attribute that I
had been told was the socially-helpful reason why it developed and
should be sustained, and why it was actually good and not just a
scam pyramid scheme. And these folks, instead, were actually not
going to try to make money the “old-fashioned way,” going back to
the Middle Ages. They were going to make money the truly old-
fashioned way, going back as far as history itself. They were going
to just take it.
This was my first-hand introduction to buying an actual
stock. Not many people actually do buy stocks in a company as an
outside individual investor the way my Uncle Hilding did. But
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things like retirement or pension plans, and mutual funds. And in
this case we pay other people, people we almost certainly never
meet in the grocery store, to buy those stocks for us. You may say,
“well, actually I do know my financial advisor, or the name of the
person who handles my account in my pension or mutual fund, at
least over the phone, and it has been Angela, somebody, who has
always answered the phone for over 18 months now.” Of course,
Angela answers the phone in Des Moines and you live in Atlanta,
but still . . . But still, Angela isn’t on the floor of the New York
Stock Exchange anyway. And the layers of disconnect between
what you hope is your retirement and the person who invests it has
greater levels of remove than even the “six degrees of Kevin
Bacon” game, a popular pursuit among some humanities graduate
students.
It reminds me of the story of a shaman explaining his
cosmology that the earth rests on an elephant, and the elephant
stands on a hippopotamus, and on and on, until at last there is a

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turtle. The visitor then asks, “and on what does the turtle rest?”
“Oh,” replies the shaman, “from that point its turtles all the way
down.” Instead of it being turtles all the way down, it is
continuously shifting investment portfolios all the way down.
What you think is fifty shares of a thing, called by the name of a
certain fund of a certain company is combined and recombined in
different ways, with a part of your money being here one moment,
there another, and for quantum gaps of time not being represented
at by anything besides an empty space on a virtual spread sheet,
only to popping back into existence as a Deutsche Mark, a barrel of
crude, a pork belly, or a bottle of snake oil. Oh, yes, discontinuities
are anathema to global market capitalism. I get it. Yeah, sure.
You may protest that this isn’t the case. Yes, you have a
mutual fund, but you were very clear that, even though you may
get a more modest return, you were not going to have any part of
pork bellies, or any commodities, let alone nuclear reactors, defense
contractors, or third world sweat shops, so your portfolio is in
socially responsible companies. Okay, that is good to try to grow
your nest egg and have it grow with as much compassion and
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responsibility as possible. Perhaps such investing actually does
make a difference in changing, ever so slightly, the direction of
money producing money, ad infinitum. But we are told that in this
brave new global market, ultimately (and not so ultimately) every
concern invests in every other concern. Financial investment firms
also sell stocks in themselves, and where do they invest their
returns?
With so many degrees of separation, with so many levels of
investment, each depending upon not merely growth but
acceleration in the next level down on the feeding chain, where is
reason and how does this ultimately redound to the individual who,
after all, is at some level supposed to be producing and purchasing
some sort of goods and services? In the last few years we have
seen the aggregate value of the stock market skyrocket, and more
recently we are seeing it plummet and then gyrate, like some gored
animal thrashing around even as it bleeds. It isn’t discontinuities
this beast finds life threatening, and it isn’t even basic speculation;
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it is a speculation on the relative certainty of acceleration, and
more strangely it is speculation on the relative certainty that the
future will be relatively certain of its speculation of future
acceleration.
I recently heard, before the Dow Jones began its fall from
grace in July, 1998, a commentator on a radio market show try to
give some basic rule of thumb as to what was reasonable and
unreasonable speculation in the stock market, and thereby how to
tell when it was overvalued, and his advice, for once, actually
sounded wonderfully common sense and homespun, and real, at
least when one is considering short term projections. He said (and
I’m paraphrasing), “Look, when people ask me things like this, I try
to give an example that they can get their minds around. Say you
were going to buy a company, like a shoe factory, from its owner.
The owner said, ‘well, I’ll sell you this factory for $500,000. We’re
in the black, we have a good customer base, and I get a total net
profit of $10,000 a year from it.’ Would you buy it? Of course not!
At that rate it would take you fifty years just to get your
investment back. What you have been offered is the ownership of a

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company where the price-earnings ratio is 50! And if you wouldn’t
buy that company with that kind of price-earnings ratio, then why
on earth would you even buy a PART of it?”
Point well taken, because that is what you are doing when
you buy some stock. And yet, during the last few years of stock
run-ups, there were stocks selling at speculative ratios even higher
than that. The most extreme example was the Internet industry,
and the now famous example of the start-up on-line bookseller,
amazon.com. Recently that company was selling for $124 per share,
with NO net earnings at all! Anyone who got through fractions in
the fifth grade knows that this is a ratio with zero in the
denominator, which you may call either infinity or indefinable, take
your pick. There is only one reason why anyone would buy a stock
in which, if you acted as a true owner, you couldn’t get your
original investment back as long as the company turned out a good
product in say, fifteen years. And that is if you are betting that long
before fifteen years are up the company will not just have grown. It
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will not just have grown in profits. It will not just have grown in
its rate of increasing profits. Instead, it will have tucked so many
economic jerks into its bottom-line that in a few years someone else
will be willing to not just pay a simple higher per share value, but
will multiply that by paying at the rate of an even steeper price-
earnings ratio than you did.
It is absolutely fascinating that, in buying and selling
stocks, you are NOT acting as though you owned the company. You
are acting much more like a fly-by-night operator, hoping to get
out of town before the person who bought your thoroughbred race
horse at dusk won’t be able to check the papers by morning. And
yet it is in precisely this atmosphere where we find companies
shutting down and moving their operations somewhere else even
though they are making a profit. Why? People like “Chainsaw” Al
Dunlop, the infamous corporate downsizer, really had it right, so
far as the system goes. When these and other CEO hired guns
were asked why they did what they did, they had an unassailable
backstop “Look, buster, in case you missed the point in economics
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are the owners of a corporation! I have been hired to do a job, by
the shareholders who are my bottom-line employers. That job is to
do whatever is called for so that they can get a return on their
investment.” Well, I guess that is why I have been so stupid all
these years. I never DID take economics 101. And if they are right
in the first place, that shareholders own the company, then it is
pretty hard to debate the second half of the argument. Then why
don’t the shareholders ACT as though they own the company, and
have some responsibility for its longevity, rather than just taking a
ride on some well-timed explosions, and for the welfare of the
people they employ?
You may be weary by this point, but buck up, there isn’t
much further to go. But before I close out this section of this very
long chapter, and this chapter is supposed to have something to do
with living by and for surrogates, you may recall that I still hadn’t
answered the question that had confounded me for nearly thirty
years now, and that was “why jump out of a window?” Well, I can’t
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interview anyone who did jump, so give me the license to make up
a character, because even with a made-up character I couldn’t make
sense of that 1929 scenario, like I could with George Bailey of It’s
A Wonderful Life.
Let us say you were a middle-aged investor of the time, not
a well-known local manager of a small savings and loan. And yes,
you have been gambling with other people’s money, lots of people,
most of whom you don’t know. You have had lots of company in
this, lots of other people doing the same thing you were doing, at
that has been a large reason why you were convinced that what you
were doing was not just okay, but it was manifest destiny. This is a
huge version of Jean Genet’s The Balcony, (discussed in the notes
to chapter one).
You even had facts on the ground--skyscrapers had gone
up--magnificent testimony that what you were doing was an
ordained good. What could match the majesty of a skyscraper?
Surely not a cathedral. In general, skyscrapers are not centers of
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anything. This is a control tower of culture. They are filled with
offices, of other people like you, or their underlings, and the
investments that support these huge icons are not just cement and
stone, girders and reinforcement bars. It is the force of acceleration
itself. It is like a person standing on a railroad and leaning forward.
The only way that person can avoid falling on his face is if that
flatcar accelerates, and keeps on accelerating. Mere forward motion
is not enough. You are speculating on the future of speculation,
and you have to go many layers down before you find a turtle.
Everything is legal, properly speaking, and even when you lean out
at a more acute angle over the accelerating flatcar by leveraging
and buying speculations on margins. But you are not alone,
remember, there are lots of other people on the flatcar leaning
forward as well, with, they hope, nothing but straight track ahead.
All it takes is for some version of a turtle (your ultimate
prime-mover locomotive) to just slow down a bit and everyone falls
over. In fact, just the rumor that a turtle might slow down is
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enough for everyone to fall over because the real acceleration of
the flatcar is that you think it will keep accelerating. It is literally
all in your head and everyone else’s. But the actual person who
jumped out of the window is not imaginary, not on a flatcar, and
there are no turtles. However, you, as this investor, have worked
very hard constructing this growing superstructure, as have the
others doing the same thing. Very suddenly, what you see around
you is not your office, your building, not even a house of cards. It is
vapor, and that vapor is your life.
It is what you have spent all those countless hours and days
doing over the years. To add insult to mortal injury, there will also
be a lot of people who are not investors who will suffer greatly
because you and many others will fall over, knocking them down
underneath you. But truth be told, you are probably not thinking at
all about them right now. You are in an existential panic, facing a
black hole of non-meaning for all your efforts, having spent far too
much time leveraging imaginary money, and far too little time
doing anything that might be impervious to mere material
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be vaporized. Yes, you are in an existential freefall, but maybe it
won’t be quite so terrifying if you just could get your vision, your
own vision, that one you desperately need. The only trouble with a
nice ending in this case, is, if you could imagine such a scenario,
what would Clarence the angel be able to show you, in his review of
your life and how the world might have been without you, that
would give you the vision you need? No, there isn’t a fire in your
office; there is something much more terrifying than that. It is
nothing. I still wish this fellow on the ledge wouldn’t jump. He can
start life again, and I know that. I wish he wouldn’t. But finally, I
could understand why he might want to.

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Chapter 6: The Great Divergence
I don’t know about you, but I could stand another amusing
story about now. Sorry. You’ll have to wait for the next chapter for
that because we still have some strands to tie up with this whole
issue of surrogates. As we’ll see in a few pages, one of the words in
current vogue among economic analysts, captains of industry, and
policy wonks is called “convergence.” This can mean almost
anything, and it is one of those slippery terms that, when someone
uttering it is pressed, might very well fracture along any number
of particular beliefs, depending upon the complete agenda of self-
interest of that person. We find the same thing when trying to
identify “Democratic” or “Republican” political beliefs, liberal or
conservative, etc.
In essence, however, it rests on the premise that we are in a
new, fundamentally better, era of economic history. Capitalism has
vanquished communism, except for a few outposts, so in the

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broadest terms the entire globe is very nearly on the same page. At
least we are converging on the same doctrine and have to work out
the kinks. In strictly material terms, this means that the entire
world is the market for the entire world. We will all be producers
and consumers, importers and exporters. Better still, it is
unthinkable that in an information age any country or province can
effectively be part of the throughput of global material commerce
without also being part of the throughput of information. And
when that happens, it is assumed, it is a short hop to all societies
being free speech democracies, maintaining universal standards of
human rights. We are therefore converging on global market
capitalism, which like every evocation of economic market
mechanics since Adam Smith, will make us better people without
our having to be better people. The laws of material commerce will
reward good social behavior and punish bad social behavior.
As I have maintained, the point of this section, as with the
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to “fix what is wrong.” I don’t have one, and for all I know some
version of global market capitalism may be the best way to manage
our material affairs at this stage of human evolution. My focus
remains to try to afford a vision of what we seem to be about, to
illuminate some visions of what we, individually and communally
may wish to be about, and stimulate reflection and conversation. I
can’t think of anything more rewarding than such a response at
any level. It is in support of these modest desires that I would like
to conclude this section with a side-by-side examination of this
postulated global convergence, with what seems to me an equally
profound divergence.
When we look at the demise of communism as an ideology,
it is quite easy to celebrate. After all, most everything about the
system that we saw seemed so contrary to so many values that we
justly hold dear, and noble. Even in its theoretical evocation (before
the examples were established on the ground after the October
Revolution, and the atrocities of Stalinism, for example) it runs
contrary to so much that was so electrifying in the visions of the
Enlightenment philosophers. We in the West had already been

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taught that the individual should have the right to pursue
happiness, to exercise all sorts of freedoms. The state, however
defined, ought not be the only locus of progressive ambitions.
Quite literally, we caught the vision that we had the right to strive
for our most excellent visions, and there was no telling just how
exquisite those visions might be until we were free to act. In
contrast, the very idea that the value of an individual life was not
in its individuality at all, but as simply a member of a soviet of
workers, was intrinsically repugnant to those who had hope of
something more. Of course, if you were buried in a coalmine,
dying young of black lung disease, forced to pay back all your
wages for survival commodities at controlled prices, and shot by
company goons if you tried to organize, then the idea of a soviet of
equals on the march would feel like emerging into pure sunlight by
contrast.
However, the premise of a pure, unencumbered, global
marketplace itself rests on a new singular ideology. In this

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ideology, it is assumed that everyone will place a premium on the
continuing acceleration of consuming and producing what is new,
and put their backs into that as a good. Even in a so called
“knowledge economy,” we still wind up with a soviet of workers
marching to the same anthem. If, in Marx’s view, the otherworldly
visions of religion are the opiate of the masses, in the global
market place what is our vision, and how is it different from an
opiate? And, to preview where we are going here, the simultaneous
great divergence that I see occurs first for the individual, the
purported focus of excellence in a free society.
That is, in order to keep up with the accelerating
locomotive of the competitive global market place, we are not
simply asked to be flexible and fleet-of-foot to survive. We are
increasingly asked to divorce ourselves from everything that, in
past generations, supplied meaningful patterns to our individual
and communal lives. How far can we diverge from our sense of
place, of personal history, and of meaningful human connection?
Undoubtedly we all have different thresholds for straddling that
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which no individual can sustain a sense of a meaningful,
worthwhile mortality.
i) When skating on thin ice, just skate faster . . .
Somewhere along the way the discipline of economics took
on the appellation of the “dismal science.” As one of the little
people looking out on the world I would respectfully disagree with
that. I think the phrase does a disservice to both words. It is
difficult for me to call it a science, by any of the examples I know,
whether physics, biology, or paleontology, or anything else which
purports to observe, gather evidence, form hypotheses, and test
those projective hypotheses into past or present and see if some
theory comports with realities, which themselves still show some
larger predictive capacity that converges or diverges from the
overall accretion of knowledge of convergent or divergent
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historical discontinuities of evidence. Except for the astronomer
whose raison d’être for study is to only march up the ladder of
professional promotion and be the final arbiter of reality (and I
don’t know of any personally, but I suppose there may be some),
such discontinuities are often met with a sort of glee. Wow! The
mysteries just keep on multiplying, and the universe never runs out
of surprises. Let’s see if we can match wits with the ineffable
wonder of it all this time.
I also think that dismal doesn’t fit very well. At least for the
individual who is embedded in a system of market capitalism, the
very acceleration of it all, combined with completely
temperamental and infinitely variable inputs, which keep shifting
not just the amount, but the direction, of those accelerations is not
exactly dismal. If I found myself suddenly in an automobile, with
the accelerator pedal stuck to the floor, only to discover that my
steering wheel had either fallen off or would only intermittently
connect to the front wheels, and the brakes didn’t seem to work,
and I couldn’t find the ignition key to shut it off, and I was on an
unfamiliar road, at night, and the headlights would turn off and on
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at random, and, if somehow the car ran out of gas before I went
over a cliff and I managed to make it home and tell my family
about the experience, the very last word that would come to mind
would be dismal.
There is only one way in which economics can possibly be
called dismal, and that is if you are not in the car and it is your job
(as a putative scientist) to predict what will happen. Let us make it
even more abstract because if I were simply to be an outside
observer watching a real passenger in such a predicament, I would
(as an empathetic co-human) be filled with dread at the likely
outcome. So, instead, you are part of an electronic game, as a
psychological test subject, and so you are simply given the task of
watching such a process, as it unfolds, with nothing more than a
virtual Pac-Man at stake, but your actual task is to infer the results
of this video game. In fact, you are told, that the experiment being
run is to see whether regular people can process information
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that there was, in fact, some underlying, projectable principles at
play. If you figured these patterns out, then you would succeed in
this psychological test of observation, synthesis, and hypothesis.
Success in your task could very well include the prediction, before
it happens, that Pac-Man will die at a specified time as the game
progresses.
Okay, this is a bloodless test of some kind of predictive
skill—it’s a game, and it requires (according to my psychological
research handlers) that I be able to apprehend logic under a time
constraint. If that is all there is, you can cast aside any real world
worries that you would be responsible for real harm to a real
creature, and you steel yourself up for the challenge, and there is
an excitement about it. Your handlers go to another room so as not
to distract you and you start the game. Now supposed that the
actual computer program that drives this Pac-Man car throws in
variables at random. You would almost certainly fail miserably, but
there is a slim chance you might succeed and be elated. You may
even be certain that you had, though your incredible wit, figured
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When your handlers come back in the room, they would
interview you, ask you how you felt during the experiment and just
what was the pattern you discovered. They might be amused at
some incredible logic you applied to figure out when the Pac-Man
car would go off the road. Then they do the experiment again, and
the computer changes the variables (and it doesn’t take much
tinkering when the variable changes something like acceleration, or
how much you can steer and when) and this time, even if you
succeeded the first time against all odds, you would certainly fail
miserably this time. In fact, you would fail even more certainly and
more miserably if you thought that you had figured out the
algorithm driving the game the first time.
If they ran the experiment a few more times, you would
continue to fail, and your anxiety level would increase because you
had first thought that you had the patterns figured out, so why do
you now keep getting it wrong? And, if you were willing to take
part in this experiment in the first place and thought that you
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actually were an exceptionally clever person (bolstered in that
estimation by the fact that you succeeded the first time), you would
have several paths to get out of that room with your sense of self
intact. One is to backtrack and admit that the first time you
succeeded was merely luck, so that the successive failures tell you,
now somewhat humbled, that you never did figure out the pattern
and so you weren’t as clever as you thought. After four tries or so,
you would probably ask your handlers to stop the game, as it was
just making you frustrated.
But now suppose your handlers came in when you had had
enough frustration, and told you that they had actually lied about
the experiment. They were sorry, but it was necessary so that you
would actually play the game. They were actually after a higher-
level insight, and that is to test human subjects operating under
what seems to be a rule-bound set of conditions when the
conditions were not, if fact, discernible by any application of
intellect operating with those preconditions, and they were trying
to measure the rate of changes from elation, to a redoubling of
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one’s own intellect, to outright resignation and acceptance of
failure. So what they really wanted from you now, was a narrative,
as best you can reconstruct it, of your inner states, of how you felt
each time the game was restarted.
If these researchers have any compassion at all for real
people (their test subjects) they won’t let the experiment go on for
too long because it can so quickly lead to disappointment in one’s
self, to a sense of resignation, apathy, and depression. So, before
you get into too much trouble, they stop the experiment,
everybody has a good laugh, and you fill out their narrative
questionnaire. If they have misjudged when to stop the
experiment, they might risk having the subject first completely
disillusioned and then angry at the deception. Rather than saying,
thanks for letting me participate in such an interesting research
project, he might instead choose to punch one of the “lab coats” in
the nose on the way out.

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In other words, an experiment meant to gather real data on,
say, the psychological arc of expectation and disappointment
(which the researchers in the other room are excitedly recording),
the subject of the experiment is left not thinking he has actually
uncovered some underlying truth, but rather that he, personally, is
not that smart and gets depressed. Economists, expected to figure
out the patterns and then demonstrate those patterns are, in this
example, not the research psychologists. They are the
undergraduate volunteer playing the game. And even if it is only a
Pac-Man whose future is at stake, not real people or real societies,
you can only convince yourself that you are clever for a few
iterations of the game. Okay, I take it back; I can see how
economics, as a discipline, can be dismal.
So, if you ARE an economist, how do you, in your day-to-
day occupation keep from just being in a dismal state of mind?
Well, there are several real distinctions between the above
psychological experiment and the real-life work of an analytic
economist. First of all you are, to a certain extent, in on the game
from the outset. No professional economist expects that he or she

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is actually in the position of the test subject in the above
experiment, where they will be allowed to play this game for a
while, but at the end of the day the door will open to their office
and a couple of lab-coated folks come in and tell him that they
were deliberately changing the algorithm each time the game was
played. To be a professional or academic economist cannot include
in that worldview such an eventuality.
Secondly, there is the implicit belief that there is, in fact,
SOME kind of world economic algorithm, and they can figure it
out. The way they go about figuring this out is actually very
respectable in the model of a laboratory science. They collect data
about the past, and develop mathematical models, which, with the
benefit of hindsight, actually give you back the historical events
when you put your data into your formula. In the physical sciences
and applied mathematics, this is called “curve fitting.” Here is a
simple example. Take a beaker of cold water and put it on a
Bunsen burner with a thermometer in it. You notice that the

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temperature goes up at some smooth rate, so you think that maybe
you could model this increase in temperature and even make a
predictive law of nature from it. That would be neat, and
intellectually satisfying, and might tell you something about the
material world.
Having made that observation, you decide you need more
than just an impressionistic observation, but actual data. So you
start over with a new beaker of cold water, and are careful that the
intensity of the flame stays the same. Now you watch the
thermometer, and note down the temperature at the end of each
second. When you plot this on a piece of paper, you will get a nice
set of points that do indeed suggest a smooth curve. So you shut
off the burner to see what this visual-mathematical representation
of heating water tells you. You start by connecting the dots, but
you realize that the process was continuous, not just jumps in
temperature when your watch ticked off successive seconds. It is
only reasonable to smooth out your graph and assume that what
happened between your observations was similar to what happened
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come up with a pretty simple algebraic formula that represents
your curve, and you say that this represents the predictive curve of
heating in a controlled situation. Not bad. And others can do the
same experiment, taking measurements every half second, to see if
you didn’t miss something in the details that would actually change
your formulations and understanding of the gross phenomenon.
Now, if you didn’t stop your experiment when the water
simply got hot, but started to boil, even you would have noticed
that your simple graph is not sufficient to account for things
getting hotter. You would notice a very interesting phenomenon
once the water started to boil. As soon as the water boils, your
thermometer stops reading higher temperatures. In fact, it will stay
at exactly the same temperature for a very long time, even though
the Bunsen burner keeps supplying heat at the same rate! Not only
that, but this just keeps being what you see until ALL the water has
boiled away, turned to steam.

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This is only a surprise if you happen to be the first person
to do it, or if you don’t know anyone else has done it before. What
has happened is called a change of state (from liquid water to
steam), and as you might imagine when you continue your graph of
temperature versus time, the shape of your graph changes
radically (and discontinuously—it is not well-behaved) once the
water begins boiling. Your original graph was fine to hand out to
your colleagues as long as everybody was only interested in how
the temperature of water changes as you supply heat within the
range of beyond freezing and short of boiling. Beyond that, your
graphs make a transition that isn’t curvy (predictable or
extrapolatable) anymore, and your new theory has to be radically
different now to be able to be useful for anything at any
temperature.
A phase change is a complicated phenomenon in nature, and
it doesn’t seem to make sense at the large scale level or say, a whole
beaker of water. So you have to come up with a different level of
explaining reality (what is water, what is heat, what is temperature,
and what is going on) to even be able to make useful real-world

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predictions anymore. And so far as phase changes go of normal
things in terrestrial environments, this has long since been
removed from the realm of the unexplainable in physical science.
The principles behind phase changes remain complex, and there
are certainly realms of science, like cosmology at one extreme, or
neuroscience at another, where the actual principles of analogies of
phase changes continue to be ever more fantastic and imagination-
bending.
I am constrained to believe that economic theorists must be
exceptional intellects in many regards. I know that I am not nearly
clever enough to earn a living that way. But the more I try to
understand the world of economic theory, the more I keep getting
slapped by cognitive discontinuities that I can’t reconcile. I am
fairly certain, for example, that there must be any number of
economic theories out there, especially since academic economics
finally started incorporating in their analyses some basic
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and division, and compound interest (sometime in the early
twentieth century) so they could see more complex dynamics in the
motions of economies, which have incorporated some analogues to
“phase change” in their models. However, not being a trained
economist (can I ever forgive myself for not having taken Econ
101?), I’m afraid that the vocabulary that they use in between their
curve-fitting formulas is like a foreign language meant for initiates
only, and, frankly, I don’t have the desire to learn that language. Yet
even if there are equivalents to a change of phase, we at the lay
level don’t hear much about it.
I would suppose that the much-hyped “information age” is
accounted by economists as something like a phase change, a
mathematical discontinuity of quantity and quality, but, again to
repair to my basic interpretation, we somehow are told that even if
it is discontinuous, the changes it incurs should still be, in the
mathematical definition, well-behaved. I am sorry to report from
the forefront of three hundred year old mathematics, but if a
function is discontinuous, there is no way it can at the same time be
well-behaved. It just ain’t so, Joe. We still expect things to move

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ahead at every level. Motion is not enough; it must accelerate or,
literally, die in a free global market. And one stopgap model to give
us more space and time to accelerate is to introduce a discontinuity
in the market machinery, but to also keep it mathematically well
behaved! How could this ever be done?
Well, there turn out to be a few handy instruments you can
inject into these formulations to paper over the incongruities and
convince yourself that things in the material world will keep
getting better. There is still enough company among those who
believe in these projections and repeat these nostrums to each
other so that a lot of people are not jumping out of windows. At
least not yet.
Even within a closed, parochial economic system there are
mechanisms that allow one to be leaning forward, to use the
accelerating platform analogy, and imagine it is possible to not run
out of track and keep going. One way is to change direction, and
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it. In fact, repairing to tabletop physics, if you continually change
direction, this is a kind of acceleration without having to change
speed. It always takes beginning physics students a bit of getting
used to when you tell them that, according to Newton, the moon is
constantly falling toward to earth. Then why doesn’t it crash into
the earth? Because the nature of its actual falling is compared to
what it would be doing if it were not going around the earth: it
would be going off in a straight line. So, merely by continuously
changing direction, the moon is, in fact, in a continual state of
falling in toward the earth in comparison to its trajectory without
the mutual attraction of gravity, namely going off on a tangent
and receding from the earth.
There are several ways an economy can change its
direction, and not just add market amounts by adding people. One
has already been discussed, and that is the appearance of an
innovation, like television in a world that had only known radio; or
the personal computer and the Internet in a world that had only
communicated either one-to-one (letter, telephone) or one-to-many
(print, broadcast). These sorts of innovations radically change the

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previous rules of commerce, and until people can come to some
sort of consensus about what this new dimension is worth to them,
the potentials are truly unknown. If this development turns out to
provide something that people either intrinsically value, or so many
other facets of society adopt it that one must also integrate it or be
left out of that society’s commerce altogether, than the innovation
grows in use and market forces at that point do the things that all
economists say is what they are really after, like smooth but
increasing rates of growth and competitive pricing, and variations
on the theme of original innovation to gain market share, etc.
However, the original innovation, if it truly is an
innovation, provides a discontinuous, not smooth, change of
direction followed by some kind of straight-line acceleration. True
innovations are hard to come by, and they are not predictable. You
can’t dictate that an innovation will happen. But there are other
changes in direction that are much more predictable in the short
run. One is the variations-on-a-theme process. Put more chrome on

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the car and give it a bigger engine, for an example from the 1950s
and 60s. Give the personal computer color, then graphics and
sound, etc. The half-life value of such variations is much shorter
than a real revolutionary innovation.
But there are still other options, tried and functional. This
includes producing the same goods or services, essentially, but
changing the meaning of its surrogacy. It isn’t this anymore; it’s
that. This process is called marketing, and Alfred Sloan of General
Motors was one of the first to master it. In this, the customer is
not merely supposed to buy more of something because they can
and two are better than one. You don’t simply replace something
because it is worn out and, perhaps when your original widget is
worn out, a better-engineered widget has been developed so you
get that instead. The logic goes beyond all this, and it derives from
the fact that simply having something is supposed to MEAN
something beyond any utilitarian value of the thing itself. This is
the heart of brand-name recognition.

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elsewhere)
But is there a limit to the imaginal value-added magic of
marketing? No one actually knows, but there are signs that there
may be such limits. There are signs of these limits even if you are
able to establish, hypothetically (like the physicist’s “spherical
cow”), that a society will never actually awaken to the most
fundamental illusion of all, and that is that they are actually
spending their mortalities pursuing surrogates in the first place.
Even working within the most myopic kind of flatland culture
imaginable, with no intimations of gratitude, depth, spirit, of
anything worth pursuing that ultimately cannot be fixed in the
coin of the realm of surrogacy, there are still hints of limits.
Just, exactly, what are you willing to pay for that running
shoe? Last year they were $80 a pair, and this year they are $120,
but you have changed the color of the logo (so everyone will know
that I bought the more advanced one) and added some new Velcro
and air bladders. Doesn’t there ever come a time when even the
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says, “you know, actually, this is still the same old foot I’m putting
in this shoe, it isn’t like I’m the Bionic Man or something and was
fitted with a new body”? I need a car to make some errands and
commute, so what exactly am I getting from this sixty
thousand dollar handcrafted sport utility vehicle with a built in
sauna and full-screen movie theatre?
These are the easy criticisms, and they go further back than
Thorstein Veblen’s idea of conspicuous consumption.
Furthermore, these criticisms can easily be dismissed by saying,
“well, of course, we should all live within our means, and some of
us simply have more means.” Or, they can be dismissed as the
typical carping of a college teacher against the “philistines” among
the rich (who remain in that class, by the way, until they give us
some money by making a big donation to our campus). But I
maintain that I am not carping against the rich or anyone else. I am
not even carping against global market capitalism. The only object
I am after is better vision, regardless of who we are, what class we

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happen to be in, or what stage of cultural and spiritual evolution
we happen to find ourselves. And in this section of the book, I am
after the vision that remains once we look beyond the “forest for
the trees,” or, once we look behind the surrogates to see what we
might really be after.
So in this pursuit, I retain the right to do such silly things
as look for meaning in clichés. Who would seriously do that? You
would be better off looking for spiritual depth in a greeting card.
However, clichés and bumper stickers usually need to have at least
some basis in some perceived reality. If they did not, they wouldn’t
even be funny as others with a different view laugh at how
“obviously” boneheaded they are from their own more enlightened
point of view. As Wolfgang Pauli might have said, “they aren’t
even wrong.” I remember seeing one bumper sticker, and for a
short while it seemed as though I saw it a lot. It read, “You can
never be too RICH or too THIN.” This definitely did not fit Pauli’s
category of “not even wrong,” but even at a superficial, flatland

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level it was at least wrong. Of course you can be too thin! You could
be so thin that you die, and it’s hard to be rich and dead at the same
time. Secondly, you can be so rich that all you have time for is
thinking about keeping what you have, in which case you are pretty
much dead in any other sense of the word excepting, perhaps,
respiration, metabolism, and cell division. Just how long can people
find meaning in the marketing of lifestyles, before the lack of
substance becomes so apparent that no one will play the game
anymore? The presumed returns of difference (status, influence,
class, work-ethic virtue, cleverness) diminish because others are
already bored by the unending succession of marketed emblems of
successful living?
A few years back I had a young student in one of my
classes who said a surprising thing. He said something like, “You
know what’s really sick? It seems like in my generation, no matter
what we do or come up with, it gets turned into somebody’s
product. I mean, whatever we do, like grunge music, or rap, or
being a slacker or a loser or a gangsta, or anything, we can’t do it
for more than a month before you see it popping up on a Pepsi add
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or something, and then everybody does it, and now you have to pay,
like, a zillion dollars for a pair of shoes that look like they’re beat
up!” Now, it so happened that I enjoyed this student quite a bit. On
more than one occasion his commentaries would make me laugh
out loud. And, after all, he was only nineteen. But this time he
wasn’t kidding, this was something that had meaning for him, and
he was annoyed. My first inclination (which I did not act on) was to
say, “Are you serious? This is a real world problem as you see it?
Get a life!”
So, I didn’t slam my student down for that. In fact, as I
recall I didn’t say anything, and a few other students probably said
something by way of support, but in a short time the discussion
returned to the subject of our readings for that day. Furthermore, I
happened to know that he was a fairly serious student (he was
always prepared with the readings, wrote his response papers
thoughtfully), and he wasn’t rich. He worked part time to support
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students driving his impossibly beat up old station wagon. But that
episode stayed with me, nonetheless.
Our academic topics might be about some grand themes
like the history of conflict resolutions, or the social responses to
Darwin, but at the end of the day these teenagers also had to make
sense of their everyday lives and the mundane contradictions
inherent in them. And what they saw was that the culture they
were immersed in was telling them that the real reason why they
were in college in the first place was to get a good job, and the
reason to get a good job was so that you wouldn’t always be left
behind while earning a living, and that the nature of these livings
they were supposed to earn hinged primarily on everyone agreeing
that stuff, and the images stuff represents, was what we were all
supposed to work for. If the majority didn’t agree on this basic
premise, then the whole superstructure would collapse into itself
and everybody, especially in an advanced economy, might be left
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elsewhere)
Perhaps there was something more than simply the
indulgence of the treasured cynicism of late adolescence in this
critique. I think that one of the indicators that there is, in fact,
more to it predates the marketing of expensive basketball shoes
and wearing baseball caps backwards. I see one of the most explicit
detachments from anything with lasting value, and a full-bore race
toward surrogates coming hard on the heels of the end of the
Second World War in this country. That indicator was and is the
absolute supremacy among the middle classes of “career” as a
thing in itself, as opposed to either the worth of what it is you do,
or why you need the salary you get from it.
As national corporations flourished in the post-war period,
with their production and sales still taking place almost entirely
within the geographic boundaries of the country, there was an
explosion in the broad category known as the professional class.
These might be engineers, accountants, middle managers, and
technical analysts of any sort. Increasingly, the ticket into this

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expanding population was a college degree, but not always, and the
price of admission was fueled by powerful strategies like the G.I.
Bill.
ii) Pay no attention to the man behind the screen!
(The Wizard of
Oz)
Imagine yourself as one of those young people, and yes,
that would be disproportionately white and male. Perhaps you had
grown up in a fairly stable neighborhood around Schenectady, N.Y.,
just to take an example. You return from the war, and enter college,
locally, and decide that you want to become a corporate manager, a
quantum leap from your father’s work experience, and filled with
the excitement of being part of a world on the move, even
accelerating, with no end in sight (unless, of course, somebody did
something really foolish and unthinkable like start another war
after the advent of nuclear weapons). You graduate, and, low and
behold, you get a job with a bold new army, this time at General
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Electric, and the really neat thing is that you can still live in your
old neighborhood. If that weren’t upscale enough to show off who
you and your family had become, maybe you would move to a
better neighborhood, where things were a little more pricey. You
could still make a short drive and see your old friends, and have the
children see their grandparents. Life is good, and getting better!
Revenues are increasing, and in some small way, you felt, you were
a part of that enterprise that helped it along, so why shouldn’t you
have a rising standard of living?
General Electric is doing well, and they are impressed with
your skills, so one day they tell you that they are opening up a
branch office in San Antonio. They want you to be in on the
ground floor of this next step, and so they want you to move to
Texas and help open up the branch. Of course, that also means a
bigger salary, and a change in job title further up the hierarchy.
You would like to think about it, but you are excited that you would
be so anointed. You talk it over with your family. Nobody knows

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what to expect in Texas, and it would mean really leaving all his or
her friends and family. But we would make more money! We could
have even a nicer house. We’ll make new friends. And as soon as we
get there, we’ll splurge a little on long-distance phone calls to all
our old friends and family. If things turn out as planned, we might
even be able to come back for the holidays in a few months!
I recently heard a little essay on the radio, by an African
American woman I presumed was about my age, maybe a little
younger. She said that her father, while she was growing up, was a
middle manager for IBM, and that in those days the families of
people who worked for IBM had their own version of those initials,
namely: “I’ve Been Moved.” In truth, her essay wasn’t actually
about the travails of moving and never having a community as a
social factor in and of itself. She talked instead of the even greater
discontinuity of identity that she experienced every time they sold
one house and moved into another in a different state, being an
African-American family negotiating the social waters that were
presumed to be the preserve of white Americans, which must have
been acutely painful for a teenager to live through. But I was still
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fascinated by the image of the moving family, whose community
identity was a corporation. This was not the first time I had
pondered the absolute incongruity of corporation-as-community,
and of the American addiction to motion as we dissolve our
geographic sense of place.
When the communist bloc began to disintegrate about a
decade ago, I remember hearing all sorts of new world predictions
coming from the pundits of economics, politics, and sociology. We,
in the United States, were already in the “information age.” Phrases
like that, as well as post-modern, post-industrial, and post-
everything were already well worn. But I remember sitting alone
in my apartment asking myself what this might really portend.
Among the reasons for the absolute flush of optimism by everyone
was, first of all, because the threat of thermonuclear war seemed
to not just ease, but to drop precipitously. This was another
example of a mathematical discontinuity, not a smooth curve, and
it was certain to have its unwanted disorientations as well. But at

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the time, that didn’t matter so much. Who cares if we go into a
temporary recession or worse, by the gyrations? We have bought a
big chunk of time, all at once. We can all bank on the fact that we
really ARE going to be alive next year, and we had been
suppressing that terror, that we might all get vaporized, in our
collective psyches for forty years now!
Then, there was the optimism generated by the new
economic “call to arms,” made possible by the fact that we could
really do something for and with the other half of the world now.
We could get up in the morning and feel that we could exert
ourselves toward global progress, and that was something that
could not only pay off very handsomely, but was the kind of work
(no matter what your part) you could really put your back into. Not
only this, but there were all sorts of other windfalls that would
make this a truly golden age like no other. The first windfall to
seize the popular imagination was our own defense budget, the so-
called post Cold War “defense dividend.”

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Amazingly, their closest accounting for how much this
country actually spent for the Cold War, is in the five and a half
trillions of current dollars, a truly unimaginable amount. This
fortress industry, what Eisenhower himself warned against as the
“military-industrial complex,” consumed not just material
resources and technologies with the single purpose of detection,
deterrence, or (fingers crossed) destruction, but consumed the
entire lives of millions through careers dedicated toward NOT
letting something happen. Now, not only would these tremendous
resources be freed up, but also we could convert whole layers of
society toward something else, literally beating swords into
plowshares.
The next windfall businesses and politicians trotted out was
the very countries (our former feared enemies) whose populations
would be enlisted as the next ranks of soldiers for a richer future.
These countries comprised a rather curious mix of “second world”
economies that had been prevented from joining the international

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community of markets through the ideological imperative of
communism. They were filled with educated people, especially in
the applied sciences and technology, which is the sort of expertise
we expected would keep the economic engine accelerating. We, the
public, had already been harangued for years about how bad our
schools were, how dumb the kids were when compared, especially
in math and science, to nearly every other country. “Fine,” you
could almost hear the CEOs say, “you wouldn’t listen up, and
smarten up your schools and your kids. We told you that the future
is high-tech, but you just sat there consuming our products but not
sending us anybody whom we could employ to make the next
generation of stuff. Well, in Eastern Europe they educated their
kids, and they know from hard experience the value of a dollar!
We’ll build some plants over there and show you the discipline of
the market place!” Of course, one part of this thinking was
patently wrong in the first place. The former Soviet states were
filled with people who actually DIDN’T know the value of a dollar,
and that would be another grand discontinuity to cash in on.

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But I remember, almost at the same time that the Berlin
Wall was torn down, asking myself what this actually meant. That
is, not the pronouncements of an economist or politician, but what
it might feel like, right there on the ground, for someone living in
one of these former Soviet states. It was so discontinuous that I
couldn’t actually make the picture come into focus, of what it
might feel like to be there, of what sense one might make of one’s
life. I guess I supposed that there would have to be something like a
huge Marshall Plan just to see these people through to their next
meal until the spores of capital investment took hold to provide
them with work and salaries. So, not knowing or imagining exactly
how they would make it from where they were to where we
imagined they would go (becoming, essentially, like us), I decided
to move my imaginal landscape up a few years and see if that made
sense. The image that finally did come into focus was frightening.
What I imagined was a small town, which had been spared
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in seventy years of state control. The lifestyle, at least in its most
fundamental aspects of the pace of change, the built landscape, and
the relationships of families across generations, had not changed
all that much from the nineteenth century. People didn’t move
around much because there was no need to do so and not much
surrogate reward waiting if one did. Materially, this might be just
subsistence living, and we in the west had no doubt that, once
given the taste of something better, and especially of the thrill of
acceleration, they wouldn’t opt instead for that.
So I imagined taking some new branch of a high-tech
company, and plopping it down in that landscape. Not just
fabrication industry, although these would certainly be a good
investment for a while, because these were educated people who
wouldn’t have to just be “benders of metal” for a foreign company.
That kind of work could be largely automated through robotics,
where you don’t need many workers at all, or it could be moved
further down the global economic line, where having workers
produce even inefficiently is still cheaper than even automation.

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elsewhere)
Let’s be real about this. Maybe open up a new research and
development branch for IBM, for instance.
And the question that immediately followed that
hypothetical scene was what would happen to the landscape? Is it
possible to put down something like an IBM, and not have that
fact, of necessity, bring everything else with it? Wouldn’t people
who didn’t have cars or much in improved roadways suddenly need
them as well? Wouldn’t they become transients, strangers to their
physical communities? Wouldn’t it necessarily mean that, for any
extended time and space, they couldn’t have representatives of
several generations living under the same roof ? Wouldn’t it
necessarily foster the same kind of individualism that we keep
calling brave and noble in this country, but which has had the effect
of hollowing out home, community, and leaving grandparents
terrified to get any older or sicker because it is so dishonorable to
be a burden on your own children? And once these ties were
dissolved, wouldn’t that leave not a culture, but a population who,

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just like us, measured their lives through surrogates, hoping, all the
while, that the horizon of those surrogates and their successors
would keep accelerating ahead of us so that we never faced the
emptiness that might make us want to jump out of a window?
We in the world’s advanced economies seem partial toward
imagining that the convergence of global markets will help keep us
accelerating. In fact, if you didn’t know already, “convergence” is
the hot phrase of the day among economists. After all, once we are
all speaking the same language of commerce, won’t that tend to
bind us together socially as well? And once every country is fully
invested in our way of life, and getting rich by it, then certainly the
imperative of wealth will also overwhelm all the other nastiness
that keeps popping up in human history, like wars and ethnic
hatred, and the charisma of weird dictators. After all, money talks
with more force and logic than things like ideologies or ignorance,
and commerce will provide such evident abundance that we will all
be speaking the same language. We’ll finally understand each other
because global commerce will strip away all illogical beliefs that
have always gotten cultures so riled up and destructive. Commerce

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will strip away the dangerous delusions that there is any reality
beyond what can be assigned a commercial value.
Even if it becomes hard to imagine the increasingly short
cycles of innovation and, much more often, brand marketing as
sustaining that acceleration, if we can just get everyone else on
board those developing economies will act like successive layers of
locomotives underneath our own. There is so much to be done in
advancing these countries, we tell ourselves, that we have at very
least another century of acceleration before everybody catches up
(as producers and consumers) to where we are right now!
According to this line of thinking, we all know there will have to
be some leapfrogging, just to prevent things like environmental
collapse, so we’ll work that in. We had a few centuries of bending
metal and burning coal in our Industrial Revolution, and China,
with one-fourth the world’s population, is still running steam
locomotives. Well, that won’t do, so we’ll trade some advanced
techniques to help them jump over that phase of our own history.
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But there is still a double-catch in even these seemingly socially
aware solutions.
Certainly, we don’t want to ride a wave of acceleration that
depends upon the developing world going sequentially through all
the phases that we have, or at the same rate. In fact, no one expects
that. But the actual acceleration of advancement of developing
nations, assuming that they all fall into line and want to do that,
can be not just quick, but nearly instantaneous. If we expect that
an individual child growing up in an advanced society today,
should, by the time he or she is twenty-two years old, be able to
have mastered enough technical knowledge of whatever sort to be
able to enter into the productive workforce of that high-tech
society (starting at birth no different from any other child), then
doesn’t it stand to reason that an entire society could do the same
thing? Sure, there are infrastructure issues, like a robust
educational system, so perhaps a generation and a half, or even two
might pass before everyone can do the same level of skilled work,
given a truly level playing field.

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elsewhere)
There is yet another problem with this model, and that is
the relative value of novelty. When I was very young my family
got its first television set, a huge monster Zenith black and white,
which we kept for about thirteen years when we replaced it with a
small black and white television. My parents didn’t buy a color
television until after I had left home. Although I had seen other
color televisions by that time, when I would visit and see color
right there in my parent’s living room it seemed pretty neat.
Children today are born into a world of entertainment that can do
pretty much anything imaginable with the sense of sight and
sound, and, so far as I can tell, they don’t find it amazing. I
wouldn’t even say that they find it all that amusing, but more just
something to do. This is not an indictment of children’s lack of
wonder or imagination; it is simply a normal response to an
environment one is immersed in. Remember our discussion of how
the human senses are most responsive to change, not stasis, and
especially to rate of change. Again, extrapolating from the

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individual to a society, why should we expect the collective
response to be any different?
The very novelty of films, talkies, radio, television, etc.,
drove their popularity, and more important for commerce, their
rates of increasing popularity until the market became saturated.
There is no dependable half-life of the commercial popularity of
past innovations in an unrestricted global market place. No one, or
group, will willingly suspend disbelief and find last year’s
innovations novel and attractive knowing that something else is
already available. There is a direct challenge presented by the
evaporation of the market-value of past innovation/novelty to any
vision we in developed economies have of continuing to ride the
leading-edge of market capitalism. Even more important, we can’t
neglect the fact that even more fundamentally the entire economic
model is completely dependent upon a global buy-in of living out
one’s life in pursuit of material surrogates. These observations are
not just technical difficulties to fiddle with as we attend to the
global market “mechanism.” These are themselves forces of
acceleration. They are rooted in aspects of human desire, and

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elsewhere)
occurring within a system of reference, for which we have no
historical data from which to extrapolate. In this most fundamental
way I believe we have come to a profound discontinuity in history.
Stodgy historians and philosophers of generations past
would sometimes intone, with the wisdom of white hair, that, at
the bottom, there really was nothing new under the sun. We can
learn everything that is truly fundamental to the human condition
if we would just read our Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. While there
is a resurgent movement to reinstate a reading of the classics,
which I think is a wonderful thing, I doubt that many would say
that it would be sufficient to tell you everything about the human
condition (...except for those tedious details of the intervening
history of the last two thousand years). In fact, there are all sorts
of insights not possible to imagine until societies take on new
forms and inhabit new landscapes, and our current forms and
landscapes ought to be giving us all kinds of new insights.

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And one of the forms that is peculiar to the second half of
the twentieth century is the rate of change of forms. For most
people in most societies whose livelihoods were accomplished after
the Agricultural Revolution, for example, their modes of living
were not only fixed, but those forms of activity extended as many
generations into the past as they could imagine with no
expectation that things would be much different extending that
generational line into the future. And without formal histories or
general literacy, the imaginal landscape of what one does in life
was stable. For the most part what one needed to know was
literally handed down by example. Even in the Middle Ages, once
an individual was ensconced in a form of social activity and
production the patterns of expected replicability remained fairly
stable. One might experience a certain dislocation in that mode
over several generations, but there was little to cause profound
dislocation, outside of the occasional marauding party or getting
trampled by your horse, to force a reformulation of what the
patterns of your own life were and useful knowledge to be passed
on to the next generation.

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elsewhere)
We look for big changes from five hundred years ago, and
we find things that seem eminently manageable from our
perspective. The historian Lynn White, for example, has made an
eloquent case for three inventions which played the crucial role in
bringing about the entire social structure we call feudalism: the
iron-clad plow, the improved horse harness, and the stirrup. The
first two allowed for a much more effective use of draft animals in
agriculture, and the third enabled the development of an effective,
professional military protectorate. The use of iron had already
been established for many centuries, and even these new techniques
were not mass-producible. Several generations would have time
enough to incorporate these new forms of society and productive
work without throwing everything out at once, and having
children’s lives handed to them as an alien exploration with no
more than a “good luck” from the parents. Even the technical crafts
such as masonry, millwright, and other artisans, had a well-defined
right of passage through the guild system, and the nature of the
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arts were also expected to remain fairly constant, certainly over the
period of a single lifetime, but most likely for many generations.
However, in this century, and particularly since the Second
World War, the rate of change in our modes of living and working
has accelerated to such an extent that it is completely
discontinuous with the past. Even the Industrial Revolution does
not come remotely close to present experience. This is the first
time when, not only are there changes in every expectation of
what patterns will define one’s life, but these changes are occurring
not over several generations, or even within one generation, but
continuously within the expected lifespan of a single generation.
Our latest projections for the information economy is that
anyone who hopes to continue to prosper and is now beginning
college or work should expect to make radical career and skill
changes perhaps a half dozen times before retirement! When
change happens this rapidly, not due to war or famine, but due to
what we are told is the proper working condition of the economic
machine, those who live in that world don’t even have to imagine
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elsewhere)
fuzzy, ill-informed histories about past societies to ask questions of
meaning about their own life efforts. Even after they have reached
adulthood, their lives become a succession of lives by any previous
historical reckoning, and they need only question their previous
five years of life to see if the trend line conforms to anything that
makes sense or provides a satisfying sense of meaning and
purpose.
As I said in the introduction to this book, I do not believe
that the rising generation is afflicted with some genetic mutation
that leaves them cynical or in malaise. They are the forward shock
troops seeing, for the first time, these rates of change in what we
do and how we do it, and discerning that they are expected to find
satisfaction from mere motion. And if what they see in the
activities of their parents and mentors looks like a transparent
addiction to mere motion, they have every right to ask their elders
if they are missing something or not. What do we tell them? What
is our vision besides “I guess we’ll never know the meaning of life,
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but do you have a real question?” This is as real as it gets. They
aren’t looking for dogma, though in their thirst for something
substantial many will latch on to dogma. They are looking for their
vision, and they are asking us if we, being further along in
mortality, see anything at all instead of just the wind in our eyes. Is
this the best we can do: on the one hand tell them to repent, or on
the other just say “good luck”? If the vision they are given is not
meaningful, how can we consider anger, apathy, and antisocial
behavior unreasonable?
Why do we do what we do, really? And that means
accounting for where we spend most of our time and energy? We
work and we buy. What do we buy, individually and collectively?
What gets the most attention in the political campaign? We need
more money for education! Great! But what is the most pressing
reason for that support for education? Well, that’s a stupid question.
Obviously, if our kids don’t get educated they’ll get left behind in the
global economy and they won’t get a good paying job in the information
age.
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elsewhere)
Okay, what else is important? Health care, you idiot. Why?
Because the cost of health care is skyrocketing, of course, and if we don’t
do something nobody will be able to afford it, and if you don’t see what’s
wrong with that, you really are hopeless. Why is the cost of health care
skyrocketing? Another stupid question! First of all, there are all those
layers of bureaucracy, then doctors get paid too much, and then there are
all those new drugs and treatments that cost an absolute fortune, and we
have to have them all. Why? Arrrgh! So that we’re not a burden on our
children when we get sick, for one thing, and so we don’t die! Oh.
Anything else important that we should be taking care of,
that is so obvious that I should understand that it is a fundamental
quantity of being human (just asking)? Of course! Public safety,
that’s a big and obvious one. I mean, a person could get killed out there!
Oh, I’ve also heard we need a missile defense system so some nut with a
missile doesn’t nuke us, and I’d have to agree that’s a pretty good idea. I’m
sure there are other ones, but those are the big one’s that come to mind, and
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what planet are you from anyway that you’d ask such unbelievably dumb
questions?
In this information age, what are the really robust growth
industries? What are the places, if you are a young adult getting
ready for the world of increasing returns, which you should think
about? There are any number of them. Let’s see, the entertainment
industry has really grown, but it is only, globally, in the many
billions of dollars in revenues right now. But with this new global
marketplace there will soon be billions more people who would like
nothing better than to be whisked away from reality, so that is not
even a mature industry yet. And they will need lots of dealmakers,
tons of programmers, a couple of actors, and boatloads of
infrastructure people, so that’s a definite winner. You also might
look at anything in health care, and that industry includes every
kind of skill on the planet. Then there is home and business
security, a real growth industry. Is there a pattern here?
Hmm. Almost forgot, anything having to do with
communications. You know a consortium has just launched sixty-

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elsewhere)
six geosynchronous satellites so that, no matter where you are on
earth at any time, you can instantaneously talk on the phone
anywhere else (with no operators!), and simultaneously get your e-
mail and a picture of your kids! And that’s just the beginning;
there is virtually no end to it. Not to be obtuse again, but exactly
why would I need to be able to do that, I mean download a hundred
messages, talk on the phone to anyone, stuff like that? Why?
Because you’re in business, that’s why! And with the new global
marketplace the potential number of people you might have to talk
to will be six billion and rising! And imagine the possibilities if all
six billion have to talk to everybody else, I mean, it boggles the
imagination. You’ve got to get the jump on the next possible
partnership. Business, as we like to say in the information age,
moves at the speed of light—it’s, like, way faster than a bullet.
If somebody told me that, if I went to college, it would
allow me to play my own small part in that grand vision I just
might think twice about it.

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iii) Can we ever go home again?
In fact we can’t go home again, if by home we mean our
individual childhoods or some earlier epoch of human history. I do
not bemoan that obvious truth. If it were true at any level, I would
have no idea where we might turn to find meaning and purpose in
existence. For teachers who insist that their students do not
understand any of the humanistic disciplines unless they
comprehend the steady march of the grim and the tragic in human
affairs are setting their students up for the inevitable detachment
and disgust that must result. This does not inspire anyone to find
the educational opportunity fascinating or worthwhile. It allows for
only the most pathetic afterthought to encourage engagement: we
have continued to fail miserably throughout history, and now
things are many times worse, so it’s your job to go out and fix
things, even though other generations have failed when facing even
more tractable problems.

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elsewhere)
When I tell my students that I actually sense more hope
that we, individuals, community, and societies, are much more likely
to make radical improvements in our quality of life, at deep levels, I
am not offering them a bit of intellectual candy to make them feel
better. I firmly believe this is possible, maybe even probable, though
not inevitable. This vision of hope is based upon many people
beginning to see through the illusions of living for and through
surrogates, and discussing what makes life worthwhile and acting
on it. And what heartens me most is the fact that I am seeing more
and more people and communities doing just that: being involved
in many versions of this reflection and inspired action.
Perhaps globalism and its attendant crises (from human
rights, to environmental emergencies, to conflict) are catalysts in
effecting the growing number of philosopher-citizens in societies,
and in their acting according to their best insights. If that is the
case, this is just the latest and most profound example of the
essential heuristics in human social and spiritual evolution: there

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are certain visions we must acquire in their own time, or in other
words, as we change our various landscapes we are able to gain
new insights about those landscapes and our lives. This is a
wonderful time to be alive, so long as one is truly alive, seeking
wisdom and insight and acting according to one’s best visions.
Most of what I would like to consider as explorations in
envisioning are in the third section of this book. However, it
seemed only fitting to share a few observations and hints that have
seemed helpful in maintaining a sense of gratitude, and an eager
engagement in activities that are deeply satisfying. I am not a big
fan of “pop psychology,” and the overflowing self-help sections of
bookstores. Still, some of the brief observations to follow might
well be found in such books, I don’t know. These suggestions are
not in a hierarchical order. I don’t have a twelve-step plan. And of
course, these are elements that have been helpful to me and I don’t
presume to assure their universal appeal.
One suggestion for “better living” I do know can be found
in the self-help section. Andrew Weil is a Harvard-trained

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elsewhere)
physician and one of the darlings of the proponents of alternative
medicine. In his book, Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, he suggests
that stressed adults make a point to regularly take a “news fast.” By
this he means not watching the evening news or reading the daily
newspaper for a while. I think he is really on to something. A
number of years ago I lived in the Washington, D.C. area, actually
“within the beltway,” as the phrase goes. During those years I
became increasingly hungry for news. I read the Washington Post,
newsmagazines, watch the news and political commentary shows.
For want of a better word, I became addicted to news. Yes, I did
find it annoying when the pundits and politicians would not just
analyze policy and events, but spout off on their interpretations of
what “the American public” feels and expects. [Columnist Calvin
Trillin has dubbed these political talk-show regulars the “Sabbath
Gasbags.”] Even with those affronts to my intelligence, I found the
gathering of news and opinion to be an insatiable quest.

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Of course, along with interesting discussions of world and
national events and trends, one was also confronted with every sort
of random disaster, whether that be a flood or a drive-by shooting.
And all these things were simply downloaded without context, and
all absolutely out of my control. First the latest scandal, including
allegations and counter-allegations. Then the economic forecast for
unemployment. Then the biggest apartment building fire in three
years claiming the lives of so many people. Then the spread of
AIDS in Thailand. Then a series of unsolved murders. Then a ten
car pile-up on the beltway. After the break we’ll have sports and the
weather. No context, no meaning, nothing but disaster, and
NOTHING I could do about any of them.
Disasters have always happened. However, before electronic
broadcast, there was a time delay between the simple happening of
an event, and learning of it. The graphic visuals were absent. To
see a traffic accident or a tornado minutes after the event makes
you feel like every disaster had just happened right next door. I am
not denigrating the average citizen for watching the evening news
—I watched it too. However, I noticed that I was beginning to feel

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elsewhere)
anxious and vigilant a good deal of the time, even if there were no
apparent reason to be so, which was most of the time. This mode
of being informed of one’s world, the anarchic pastiche of
unmitigated disaster, is absolutely antithetical to any creative,
considered, or compassionate state of mind. I still read the news,
but I try to do it once a week, not hour-by-hour, and I must say I
feel better for it.
I also try to find as much time to participate in the things I
always feel better for having done. Among my absolute favorite
activities is engaging and lively conversation, preferably with lots
of laughter along the way, even if the overall theme is serious. As a
teacher I get paid, in part, to have great conversations! But I look
for it everywhere, and almost without fail everyone feels energized,
hopeful, and more fully alive and human for our taking time for
conversation. Even observing others engaged in real conversation
brings me joy. And some of the conversations would not normally
be termed such. Among my personal favorite things to do is see

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live jazz. When a jazz group is really in a groove, it is a
conversation beyond words. It is exciting, sublime, exhilarating—
the best example I know of democracy as art.
Then there are some more individual directions. Some
people hate to be alone, and they need something going on all the
time to feel secure. I find that if I can’t have some time, every day,
to reflect on my own thoughts that I tend to lose my way. My
ability to envision disappears, and I am solely preoccupied with the
next appointment, the next deadline, and I start to feel less secure
and less substantial. There are many ways individuals use to
introspect and reflect. The rise in our culture of the practice of
various strains of Buddhism (or at least an awareness of them) has
led many to conflate Buddhist concepts of meditation, mindfulness,
and awareness with something like a comatose state, confusing
simplicity with simplemindedness. The terminology used is
sometimes unhelpful for those who only hear popular summations
of such things as Zen practice, and one of the more abstract terms
for Western minds is the attainment of “emptiness.” Who could
ever want that?

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elsewhere)
The Buddhist scholar and teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn,
describes this concept eloquently, and in a way more rich and
satisfying to me, than anyone else. “‘Empty’ doesn’t mean anything
unless you know empty of what. My cup is empty of water, but it
is not empty of air.” He goes on to describe that a true
understanding of reality, is to understand how every existence, all
things as well as all beings, “inter-are.” That is, nothing exists as a
completely separate entity. Rather, everything receives its existence
and its meaning in relationship to everything else. He continues,
saying: “But, empty of a separate self means full of everything.”
Regular and deep reflection, unless hopelessly confused with
anxiety, ultimately has the effect of putting one’s own existence
and concerns into perspective. Your mind is no longer filled with
the unreal fullness of just you, your schedule, your problems, and
your imagined upcoming crises. When you empty your mind of
just you, you begin the process that allows all that is flow through
you.
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Finally, I have found it invaluable for well over twenty years
now to keep a personal journal. It is one thing to give yourself
over to reflection. It is another process to record those reflections. I
have found that the very process of writing to myself has the
effect of giving those thoughts a different voice. This voice speaks
back to me from the page, often telling me new insights in the
process, as though I were having a conversation. In fact, I am
having conversation. After many years of teaching, and coming up
with all sorts of suggestions for what to learn and how, these are
the sorts of wisdoms I have come to feel I can leave with my
students as practices I believe in.

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elsewhere)
370
Part Three — Deep Practice, Synthesis, and

Envisioning
(Thoughts on conversation,
community,
education, and what is worth
doing)
Chapter 7: When Questions Come of Age
i) A river runs through it (the stages of life)
I recently read a touching little reflection by a middle-aged
father who took his fourteen-year-old son on a camping trip. At the
end of a week of backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park,
the father and son found themselves sitting one evening on a ledge
overlooking a freshet of snow melt coursing through the rocks
below, and after a bit of silence immersed in this elemental

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landscape, the son commented quietly, “This is a good place.” The
father replied simply, “It is.”
As they packed their things and began their trip homeward,
the father noticed his son becoming somewhat disconsolate and
self-possessed (as teenagers do!), and he noticed his own level of
anxious preoccupation rising as well, as he began anticipating the
business and duties that awaited him back home. Once home, the
father continued thinking about how his life was revving up again,
about messages, manuscripts, and e-mails, and when some
neighbors called to ask him and his wife over to watch a glorious
night sky, he told his wife to convey his regrets, there was just too
much to attend to. His wife, being wiser, told the neighbors they
would be right over, and in the beauty of quiet friends letting
themselves become absorbed in the grand mystery of infinite
space, he again found his place, his center. The great contrasts
between two very different states of mind led him to some
reflections, nothing we haven’t heard before, but his words carry
the ring of primary experience:

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If our addition to growth is rooted in evolutionary
history, we can’t just decide to feel good about living with
less. We can, however, shift the focus of our expansive
desires. We can change the standard by which we measure
prosperity. We can choose to lead a materially simpler life
not as a sacrifice but as a path toward fulfillment. In ancient
terms, we can learn to seek spiritual rather than material
growth.
Meditation, pilgrimage, and other forms of
religious inquiry are only part of what I mean by spiritual.
I also mean the nourishment that comes through art,
literature, science, through conversation, through skillful,
useful work, through sharing bread and stories, through
encounters with beauty and wildness. I mean slowing down
and focusing on the present moment, with its inexhaustible
depths, rather than dashing through life toward some ever-
retreating goal. . . .
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Less burdened by possessions, less frenzied by
activities, we might play more with our children, look after
our elders, plant flowers, read books, make music, come to
know the local birds and trees. We might take better care of
the land. We might lie down at night and rise up in the
morning without feeling the cramp of anxiety. Instead of
leaping around like grasshoppers from notion to notion, we
might sit still and think in a connected way about our
families, our communities, and the meaning of life. (“The
Stuff of Life: do you own it, or does it own you?” by Scott
Russell Sanders, reprinted in The Utne Reader, Nov.-Dec.,
1998, pp. 47-51).
I thought this little reflection to be lyrical and familiar. It
also left me pondering some patterns beneath the story as told.
Sanders’ essay is personal, reflective, and it rings of truth. It has
been evoked for centuries in wisdom traditions, and I come away
from reading the Tao Te Ching with similar reflections on what is
important, what is delusional, and with a gratitude to be alive. We
hear the same insights from the transcendentalists of the

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nineteenth century such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman. In
the last twenty years more and more Americans have searched for
simplicity, reverence, sense of place and community, and many have
also searched for transcendence and direct experience of the
spiritual through a host of movements that slide and merge in and
out of vogue, and in and out of alliance with each other. The
acolytes of transcendence have mostly come from the educated
middle class, and not infrequently their suddenly need to come to
grips with their lives, through considered and patient reflection
and change on the one hand, or through every sort of snake-oil
mysticism on the other, occurs when they themselves are
approaching middle age.
If we posit middle age in contemporary America to be
somewhere between age 40 and 65 (I want to give plenty of
latitude here), we can see that this is not an historical constant. Go
back a century or two, and what we consider to be middle age
would be already accounted to be a full lifespan. Go back to very
early civilizations and our anthropologists and paleontologists tell
us that age thirty is about what one might expect. One is old by
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that time, and the rigors of providing for the necessities of life
would have weakened the body and made it mortally susceptible to
physical insult of many varieties. In late twentieth-century
America, a young adult is often just realizing his or her
professional aspirations by age thirty, if they have a mind to raise a
family they are often still looking toward that as a future phase of
life. They may be changing professions five or six more times
during their careers. The peak earning years are, statistically,
reckoned to occur at around the age of 50, and we are increasingly
hearing debated that the notion of expected retirement from
employment at age 60 or 65 to be outdated (by actuarial data) and
unworkable (by Social Security and pension plan projections) and
not even desirable. After all, if one is alive and healthy at age 70, it
is assumed that work is intellectually stimulating, socially
connecting, and economically beneficial for the individual and
society alike.
Long ago the writings of Hinduism posited at least four
primary stages of life. The first was that of the “student” of life,
which would commence between age 8 and 12, acquiring the

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necessary skills to function in adult society, and this would
continue perhaps to age 20. The next stage is that of the
householder, during which the individual raises a family, is
gainfully employed, and active in acquiring status, wealth, and is
engaged in matters of running the community. The next stage is
contemplative, and may be demarked by the birth of a grandchild.
In this third stage one is free to seek philosophical wisdom,
husband and wife together or separately, and solitude and retreat
may be necessary. For the properly evolving individual, the last
years of life are of a different nature altogether. Before death, one
would be fortunate to have realized the dissolution of the self (that
is, of the ego in Freudian terms) and have no attachment to
anything, anyone, or any place. One apprehends the “all in all,” that
all is transient, all is flow, and one is therefore content and serene
in any place, in any condition, no longer the lone introspective
seeker, but a joyful observer of all that is, including all the stages of
life and activity of the younger generations.
What, then, of passing on wisdom to the next generation?
One simple answer is that if all humans, in the ideal case (that is,
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they do not die young and are open to wisdom at each stage of
life), go through a similar set of stages or patterns of life, then the
wisdom of what comes next is always modeled in that culture by
individuals in that subsequent stage, for those in the previous
stage. In the Hindu tradition, one is not expected to be an ascended
master of consciousness as a child, or even as a young adult. They
recognized that that is not how life proceeds. In fact, society would
fall apart were it not for acting well in one’s successive stages of
life. And so one is given cultural permission to be a child, a student
of practical living, an adult who seeks to amplify one’s station and
responsibilities, etc. But there is always a model available of the
next stage, so one is not lost floundering around out of one’s age
without purpose or direction.
Yet we creatures of the impending millennium live in a
very different landscape. With rare exceptions, we have no rites of
passage to indicate when one has become an adult. We have
substituted the search for wisdom with the search for technical
expertise (in any field). We disregard our elders as “out of the
loop,” not able to master the new techniques of the workplace (and
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by implication, of living). When we do turn to them, it is to bring
them out of early retirement to teach the professional skills they
have (providing they are recent enough) to our youngsters to
augment the public education mission of preparing youngsters to
work in the global marketplace. Middle age has now been pressed
into service to coincide with maximal technical skills, maximal
earnings, and time to leave the foolish questions of youth (e.g.
What is the meaning of life, and what is the good life) behind and
get on with life’s imperatives, like saving for retirement and
making sure one is self-sufficient in every way after retirement.
This sounds like a good prescription for fear of death, and even
fear of life itself. It sounds like a breeding ground for anxiety and
psychosis.
And so I thought about the little story, related above, of the
father and his fourteen year old son. I do not know this family, but I
think that this adolescent boy is very fortunate. It is perfectly
alright for a fourteen year old to be ignorant of the meaning of
life, and to be thinking instead of what he will wear to school, what
new CDs he will buy, and if he can get a date. What does matter,
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and this is crucial, is that he has someone in the generation ahead
of him who actually does ask these questions and is trying to act
by the best wisdom that comes from asking these questions.
Hopefully these individuals are his parents, perhaps even some
admired teachers, and some relatives. As long as that child can
intuit that someone is asking those questions, and is still able to
lead a hopeful, grateful, and creative life of purpose, then all is
well. He has the freedom to be a child. Without that confidence
that the older generation has some wisdom, he is likely to deduce
that life is already as good as it gets, and for anyone who has gone
through adolescence, that is an awful thing to wish on anyone.
Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I went on some
camping trips with my father and my older brother, Brian, whom
I’ve mentioned before. My father loved the outdoors. He even loved
our own little outdoors, outside our house in New Jersey, and he
was most grateful at the number of birds that made homes in our
trees. He had a book on birds so he could identify them, but he
wasn’t an expert. The only birds I remember by name that he
pointed out to me while standing in our yard were the pileated

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woodpecker and the tufted titmouse. I remember the former
because it was fairly large (I thought), and it would peck away at
our trees with great energy, and I was impressed when my father
explained the physiology of the woodpecker’s beak, how it was
mounted on a kind of shock absorber that allowed it to produce
great impact on the wood with minimal impact back at the bird’s
cranium.
I thought that was an excellent bit of engineering, but it
still hurt for me to watch it bang away at a tree without imagining
it must result in some sort of disorienting pain. I knew how much
that could hurt, having sustained a few major impacts to my own
brainpan when just playing around, and, in one instance, by being
profoundly unaware of anything but my own daydreams. That
happened one sunny Saturday. We lived in an old house at that
time, and it still had a stone cellar, a coal furnace that was later
converted to heating oil, and a wonderful musty smell. My father
did his carpentry work in that basement, and I had a little bench
next to his where I would do my all-important tinkering. It was a
magical place, especially on Saturdays in autumn. There was a set

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of hurricane doors that opened to the outside, and stone steps
going down, with a modest doorframe of broad boards set into the
stone foundation that constituted the entry-proper into the inner
sanctum.
I remember my father was working in the cellar on a
plywood boat that my brother, father, and I would soon take on a
float trip down the Susquehanna River, and I had no
responsibilities that day except to enjoy myself. I was just running
around the yard, hopping on my huge old Schwinn which weighed
more than I did (with a big spring shock absorber on the front),
and generally feeling so much exuberance that I didn’t know what
to do with myself. At one point I dropped my bike to the ground
and went over to the cellar doors to see what my father was up to
with his green-painted float-boat. Not knowing what else to do, I
decided to go down and stand next to him, and see what was up.
In my unbridled enthusiasm, I just jumped down the stone
stairs in two hops. The last hop would land me in the cellar, and I
decided to make a big entrance. What I hadn’t counted on was the

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fact that the doorway was only about five and a half feet high. I
was looking at the place on the cellar floor where I would make my
dramatic dismount from the steps. My exhilaration of flying
through the air lasted perhaps a half second, until my trajectory,
still on the ascent, was rudely interrupted by the top of the
doorframe, square in the middle of the top of my head.
I bounced off the doorframe, and landed with great force on
the cement floor, legs spread out in front of me. I was in the
process of meeting my maker in two ways. First, I had never hit
my head so forcefully against anything in my life (not even when
Billy Wrin’s little brother hit me in the head with a full swing of
the baseball bat while I was playing catcher). There was intense
pain mixed with a most unpleasant swirl of colors and patterns. It
felt like my brain had been extruded to my feet.
Secondly, I hit the floor so hard, right on my tailbone, that
all air was immediately expelled from my body. With the little
sense I had left, I thought that I would die of suffocation before the
brain trauma did me in. I was completely immobilized. My father

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looked at me, surprised, but I wasn’t unconscious and I didn’t do
anything. I stared straight ahead, unable to breathe, move, call for
help, or even cry. I don’t completely remember what happened
next, but there was considerable rolling around, holding parts of
my body, and gasping for air. Perhaps that is why I was so
viscerally impressed, several years later, when my father explained
to me the mechanics of the pileated woodpecker.
In any event, the three of us did take that trip down the
Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Perhaps three years later the
three of us drove up to the Rideau Lake in southeastern Canada,
and camped out and fished for a week or two. We made that trip
once more while I was still a teenager. I remember my father’s
enthusiasm and reveries on those trips. He loved everything about
it. He loved camping, the wilderness, the ever mystical promise of
bass or lake trout, etc., etc. I did enjoy going out on the boat, and I
took some pleasure in fishing, but more in the act of casting than
in waiting for a bite. I also remember a lot of mosquitoes, of how
much I disliked the smell and feel of the bug repellent we wiped on
our faces and necks. And while I did appreciate some of the
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wonderful scenery, mostly what I thought about was all the things
I wanted to do once we got home, projects I wanted to work on
and getting together with my small circle of close friends. I was an
adolescent; what was I supposed to think about? But I’m sure that
somewhere, even at the time, a part of me was reassured that my
father seemed to be in another world, a world he cherished.
Those trips became more rich for me as I grew older. It was
the memories of those times and landscapes that I could recall and
experience a part of what my father experienced. They also
provided us with some funny stories that never seemed to lose their
humor. My father, as I have probably mentioned, was very
Victorian in many respects, especially about anything having to do
with nudity or sex. Nonetheless, he considered it his God-given
right, when we were out in the wilderness and no one else was
around, to go skinny-dipping.
One time we were out on a lake, fishing, and we had rented
a little twelve-foot boat with a small outboard engine. It was a hot
afternoon; we were in a little alcove, and my father decided it was

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time for a swim since the fish were apparently all taking a siesta. So
he stripped down and jumped in, and invited us to do the same, but
Brian and I stayed in the boat. We watched as my father swam
around, trying out different strokes, and generally refreshing
himself, all the while telling us we should do likewise. Finally, my
dad was pretty tired and swam back. My brother waited until my
dad was within ten feet of the boat, and then started the engine
and zipped off about twenty yards. My dad laughed at this trick,
and, spitting water, said something like, “hey, come on you guys!”
He swam up to the boat, and this time, just as my father was about
ready to hoist himself up, Brian took off again. We kept this up
about four times, until my father started looking desperate and we
let him in. Really juvenile humor, admittedly, but Brian and I (and
my Dad, once he got his breath back) thought that had to be about
the funniest thing ever.
About ten years before my father passed away at age 75, he
started trying to work up some enthusiasm for us going on another
camping trip. By that time, of course, we all had adult lives of our
own, and were always busy. I would see the eagerness in my

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father’s eyes for the idea, now that we were all men, and I would
humor him along that, yeah, I would tell him when I got a week
free. But we never did. I am sorry that we didn’t. But this is not
meant to be some wrenching admission of life-opportunity lost.
No, we didn’t go on a camping trip again, but my father and
I became very close friends, especially in those last ten years. I
spent a lot of time with him, and we had great conversations and
did other things together; it’s just that camping wasn’t one of
them. I probably could have appreciated the reverie of the
wilderness much more at that stage of life, and in that he would
have still been my mentor. However, another thing happened which
was in part why our relationship deepened so much. I was
exploring new ideas, and new worlds that my father never had, and
in some respects I became his mentor. I still sought his advice, but
he depended upon me to be his emissary to the world of new
challenges and insights that had not been a part of his experience.
I would explain these new landscapes to him, and he would inhabit
them with me, and then we would converse and advise each other,
as two men who loved and respected each other. When my father
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passed away from cancer, as had his father before him, I was
profoundly sad, beyond words. It was the sadness that I simply
loved him and missed him immensely, but thankfully it was not a
sorrow shot-through with remorse or regret. He knew how much I
loved him, and I knew how much he loved me, and we had said our
goodbyes. He had had a good and passionate life. He left me with
that passion and the knowledge that such was the order of life, and
I knew that part of him went with me as I continued my journey
along other rivers, rivers he had not navigated.
ii) When are we available for wisdom?
I think it must be part of the human condition to feel
misunderstood: by your parents when growing up; by teachers in
school; by friends who change in ways different from you; by
acquaintances who have stayed in the same neighborhood while
you went elsewhere; by a spouse or partner; by one’s own children.
It isn’t until we have some significant life experiences to call our
own that we begin to realize that some of the most poignant

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episodes of feeling misunderstood had relatively little to do with
the other party from whom we felt estranged. Instead, we were the
strangers to understanding our own evolving natures. We may
have felt the first intimations of change or doubt in previously held
truths, but hadn’t the courage or insight to see ourselves as
creatures in process. In struggling to suppress the contradictions
that must necessarily accompany every metamorphosis, we strike
poses of who we think we ought to be. We confuse ourselves, and
consequently it is no mystery that others can’t keep up with those
changes that even we can’t give voice to.
Yet even this worldview misses the truth somewhat. For in
truth we are all in metamorphosis all the time, and it is the rare
individual, indeed, who can appreciate those changes as they occur
as good and evidence of life itself. The process is continuous, and
not just step-wise, and in any relationship between two individuals,
it is occurring simultaneously and distinctly for both persons.
Those individuals to whom we often look for wisdom because they
live creatively, well, with compassion and engagement, and are not
easily beset by discord around them, are not (as we may assume)
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static creatures, having attained a final state of holy grace. Rather
they are fully aware of their own spiritual and intellectual
evolution, and are joyful in that emblem of their humanity. They
are receptive to introspection and envisioning, and as such they are
both co-creators of their lives, and grateful spectators of their
lives. We seek their company because a part of us senses that they
celebrate the evolving creatures that we are, and would be the last
people to express harsh criticism that we are not the same person
they once thought they knew.
To live in celebration of change is a practiced art. I don’t
mean the kind of change that occurs willy-nilly, or the sort of
“whatever . . .” attitude that reveals mere fickleness, fascination
with superficial novelty, or lack of a sense of personal commitment
and integrity. The change I am speaking of is considered, not
taken lightly but neither looked on with dread or morbidity. It is
the kind of change that comes from honest reflection with one’s
self, and can then explain such changes to another of integrity,
without deception or dissembling. We are capable of embracing
such change at most stages of our lives, with varying degrees of

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insight and appreciation, but for me to say as much (which may
sound very sensible as you read it) flies in the face of our age-old
characterizations of the stages of life. When you look at the
phrases we blithely throw around to “identify” who someone “is,”
we do so because it is easier to see them as static individuals, with
set characteristics that we can then use to make quick assessments
of whether she or he is someone we like or dislike, or the limits of
association we wish to set in our dealings with the other. We are
not reflexively disposed to approach others (or even ourselves) as
though they were, as Aristotle would have said, in the process
(continually) of “becoming.”
You would get nothing but nods of assent, in casual
conversation, if you were to make the standard descriptions of
childhood, youth, young adulthood, middle age, and those advanced
in age. “Infants are completely open to anything; they’re just
fascinated by anything they haven’t seen before.” “Young children
are 1) fearless; 2) shy; 3) not like their siblings; 4) just like her
mother, etc.” In fact, you can hear parents of youngsters trot out
anything at all that merely describes a child, and then append any
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reason to that observation that validates the characteristic with the
assurance that they have just uttered an eternal truth. “Teenagers
are rebellious, just because they are trying to be 1) rebellious; 2)
find their own identity; 3) moody. . . etc.” Unless, of
course, they aren’t rebellious, in which case they are “on the right
track.” And on and on. Young adults are “lost because they are
coming to grips with adulthood and finding their own way, or
meeting a completely different circle of friends at college.” Middle
aged folks like to see themselves as “bearing the weight of the
world, taking on real professional or work responsibility, trying to
make a support system for those for whom they are responsible,
with precious little time for diversion, let alone navel-gazing.”
“Senior citizens are, you know, out of touch with the pressures of
contemporary life, and they are set in their ways.” Unless, of
course, they aren’t.
We don’t all talk this way about everybody all the time. But
such utterances are common currency enough in casual
conversation that when actually looked at critically, they seem to be
a hopeless tangle of contradictions, or perhaps just conversational

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space-fillers. And yet when we are not talking about somebody,
especially someone not present, but talking with someone, a
different picture emerges. A real conversation involves intense
listening, and a high degree of empathy on the part of the speaker
to be understood (not just to be heard or victorious); as well as a
longing empathy on the part of the listener to help the other be
understood, to understand what she is saying, and (as in the
examples given several times in this book of storytelling) to make
those utterances more true than they would be in the absence of an
empathetic listener.
If one is privileged to be in such a conversation, one is in a
sacred space. Conversants come away from such encounters
changed, regardless of the subject matter. For far too many people,
such encounters are so rare in their daily lives that the experience
can even be disorienting. Heading back to a meeting or a
spreadsheet after such an encounter can leave one reeling in
possibility, elevated by the communion, and trying to figure out
how to make it happen again. What happened was not a mere
transfer of information, or a debate won or lost. What happened

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was an encounter with wisdom, called up by awareness, generosity,
and empathy. Best yet, and contrary to popular belief, anyone can
do it. How can we do that? How can we make such real,
meaningful, and vibrant conversation a part of ordinary life,
something we should expect from life, not something we see as an
aberration? In a functional way, it is like learning to appreciate
music: the more you are involved in it, the more natural AND the
more rewarding it becomes, for all involved.
I have given some thought to the art of meaningful
conversations, and the lives of those with whom I have had fine
conversation to see if there are any indicators for when (in terms
of stages of life) individuals are most susceptible to have depth and
awareness and the other keys for generating wisdom. Those
indicators are sketchy at best. Many of my insights come from the
program in which I have been teaching, so I need to include a little
background about that experience to give context to my remarks
on when and how individuals become interested and conversant in
deep, open-ended conversation that produces wisdom-insights.

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The program in which I have been teaching for over seven
years now is an undergraduate, interdisciplinary, liberal arts
degree granting school within a state university, known as the
Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University. A
philosophy professor in the late 1960s, Warren Olsen, first
conceived the model. He was inspired in his vision of
interdisciplinarity and inquiry-based learning by his first
encounter with the late Robert Maynard Hutchins, a major
educational reformer and president of the University of Chicago,
when Olsen was a high school student growing up in Chicago.
Together with a few like-minded souls Olsen came up with a
proposal for an experimental humanities program at a time when
there was some freedom to try experiments at the college level,
some of which blossomed, but most of which did not, sometimes
for very good reasons (fluffy, ill-conceived, no content, etc.). Olsen
was not certain what the creation of this program would entail at
the outset, and probably expected that it would rapidly evolve as he
recruited faculty for this new program.

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The Hutchins School enrolled its first students in 1969, and
what followed was “interesting,” to say the least. The debates over
essential courses, curriculum, and methods were hotly debated in
weekly faculty meetings even after the teaching program had
already started. It should be mentioned that one of the essential
ingredients that would set off the Hutchins School from all other
academic departments was that the primary teaching venue would
be (and still is) composed of seminar discussions. In the ideal
seminar setting, a group of twelve to fourteen students meet
around an oval table with their faculty facilitator and course
teacher. The role of the professor is to act as a catalyst and
facilitator for in-depth discussions of the topic at hand, and when
necessary be the academic specialist who could move the students
out of stalled or unproductive discussion based upon missing
elements of essential background.
One of the first faculty members thought that in order to
be truly open-ended, there shouldn’t even be a curriculum, and the
contents and reading lists for any class should be left up to the
students who showed up. Luckily for the future of the program,
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Warren Olsen was a bit more of a formalist than that. For my part,
when I had heard from Warren and other faculty who were around
from those early days, I immediately thought of all the worst
aspects of progressive parenting and education that found a brief
popularity during the 1960s. The cry of “freedom” on these fronts
among what was, even then, the radical fringe that saw fascism or
imperialism or some other great “ism” at every turn, and they
violently objected to anything resembling a hierarchy of
knowledge being foisted upon the true innocents of society, the
impressionable young. According to the most extreme leading
edge, there was something poisonous to the young in imposing any
received wisdom (I don’t think they actually used the word
“wisdom” at all).
So, for example, if you thought your youngster might enjoy
music, the best thing to do was simply expose them to ways to
make it themselves without formal training. If you had a piano in
your home, let the toddler bang around on it, but never subject
them to the formalisms of scales, practice, or lessons. Whatever
they bang out with their little fists, be sure to lavish praise on it
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and maybe even insist that their spontaneous banging was
somehow more real and valuable than any Mozart concerto. Of
course, most of us (I hope) know how these things end up. The
child, rather than deriving any sense of joy at creating something
themselves, is quickly bored by random plinkings and moves on to
television, which at least has some entertaining visuals and
sometimes even a story to it. Perhaps this mindset of a new golden
age heralded by the immediate jettisoning of anything like effort,
discipline, and patient mentorship is nowhere better parodied than
in the outrageous novel, The Serial: a year in the life of Marin
County, by Cyra McFadden.
To make a long story short, Warren Olsen’s vision,
including the idea that there should indeed by a rigorous
curriculum designed by well-educated faculty, held sway. A larger
group of faculty were recruited out of graduate programs in a
variety of disciplines beginning in 1970, and for the next few
years, while they built and taught a coherent curriculum, the
faculty debates continued hot and heavy about the overarching

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intellectual framework and the structure of the integration among
disciplines and courses.
I won’t belabor this history further but to say that it has
undergone many changes over the years. The nature of the courses
required the teachers to be able to work together (often teaching
sections of courses designed by an interdisciplinary team, that was
called a course cadre). Those who came from the arts, social
sciences, history, physical sciences, had to make sense to each other.
In lower division courses where they would co-design and co-teach
multiple sections of an entire intensive course of study, they had
to understand each other’s disciplines and the compelling reasons
for their suggestions for themes and readings within the overall
course, and they all had to be able to understand and teach these
different subjects (that is, lead seminars), at least at the level that
we expected of our undergraduate students. I should note here
that the particulars of the program I’ve just described is an
intensive example of a wider educational mode called “Learning
Communities,” which is gaining a national audience and is
springing up across the country in various incarnations.

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When I first came to the Hutchins School in 1991, after
completing a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, I did not
really know what I was getting into. My doctoral dissertation
advisor at Johns Hopkins had simply seen a position search notice,
where the position description included a desire for someone with a
Ph.D. in the history of science, with training and experience in one
of the natural sciences, and for someone who had a proven
teaching record and was interested in working with an
interdisciplinary faculty. Having come to know me and my previous
careers well, my advisor sent me a copy of the announcement with
a post-it note saying: “This looks like exactly what you are looking
for,” suggesting I should check it out. It took some time for me to
become accustomed to facilitating, rather than lecturing (after all,
what would undergraduates actually be able to contribute in their
callowness to things I had spent my life studying?). But after a
semester I began to calm down from my need to simply download
everything I knew already, and began to cultivate more of the
empathetic listener and catalyst for their own learning. I realized
that there were times when I certainly did need to step in and give
400
them additional background beyond what I had put into the course
readings, and this often took the form of the students actively
petitioning me to share these things.
I came to realize, once I had become able to guide and really
listen, that quite often these students not only understood some
very deep concepts which they were encountering for the first
time, but that they were synthesizing wisdom that was truly their
own. They were learning to express these ideas with compassion
and passion, and I knew that the sorts of learning that were
occurring in these episodes (which were increasingly the norm and
not the exception!) were truly life changing.
They were learning the difference between wisdom and
factual knowledge, without dismissing the informing power that
factual knowledge brings to wisdom. Their communicative skills, in
seminar discussions and in writing, were uneven, but there was an
undeniable upward trajectory. They were learning, by direct
experience, both the truly wonderful potential of their own minds

401
in meeting acknowledged great thinkers on their own terms, and,
most significantly, they were learning the way that wisdom and
insights are multiplied when a directed discussion is engaged by a
group of active participants and active listeners. All of these
things came as a revelation to me, but they also came as a
revelation to the students themselves. They had not previously
realized the joy of truly searching conversations about things that
really mattered, among a group of peers whom they respected and
with whom they felt a mutual responsibility to do their best. In
relating these experiences to the reader, I recognize that more
detail is in order. That will be done in the following chapter. At this
juncture I only wish to emphasize that we regularly underestimate
the potential for deep understanding and wisdom among our
mainstream youth. It has been my personal experience that has
awakened me to the fact that I had the very same assumptions, and
they were wrong.
So, let me return to the question of when we are available
for wisdom? Completely unexpected to me, I found out first hand
that eighteen year olds are capable of this. Now, truth be told, even
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when I taught high school I had encountered exceptional
individuals (not only the academic superstars) who seemed not just
smart, but wise beyond their age, and I wondered where these kids
came from. When I saw it at a state university, I was again shocked.
These students were quite often, by the normal modes of testing
and ranking in our society, quite ordinary. I found out that many of
the entering students ended up in the Hutchins School almost by
default. Most really had little or no idea of what they were getting
into. They had never been in a seminar discussion before; they had
never had any course that might even be called interdisciplinary, let
alone transdisciplinary. They had never been required to formulate
coherent analyses of things that mattered and had basically
learned to manage by being passive and showing up for class. And
here I was witnessing not just a few, but a majority of our
students, after finding their feet (and their minds and passions)
thriving in this environment.
Granted, there have always been a few students who, even
when given the exposure to this environment and invited to rise to
the occasion, were simply too immature to take on this kind of

403
responsibility for their own education and for their commitment to
their peers. There are always a few whom, after a semester or two,
we counsel out of our program, and they usually agree that a
standard curriculum of separate disciplines, of courses defined by
a single textbook, and of lecture and test is more suited to their
temperaments. However, I am always surprised at the number of
otherwise ordinary students who are immeasurably inspired once
they have seen the vision of what learning can be about, and the
unparalleled experience of wisdom-generating conversation
among peers and mentors. And I, for one, could not clearly see this
vision either until my students helped me experience it.
It is nearly a daily occurrence for me to find myself
awestruck by the insights of several students, and I try to let them
know how marvelous these insights are in the moment. And I have
told my students that I can do a pretty good job of recalling my
own thoughts and concerns when I was their age, and they are far,
far, beyond any insights I was entertaining at that age. Often they
look at me with a kind of disbelief, thinking I am just being kind. I
think it is a natural disposition for college students to think that

404
their professors are of a different species, or some such thing, and
they read this image back into whatever sort of person I might
have been when I was their age. But I am not giving them empty
compliments. I also tell them that had I even known that there was
a program like this when I was an undergraduate, I would have
tried to get into one. But at the same time I tell them that if I had,
I am not at all sure that I would have been mature enough myself
to really understand what was going on, and very likely would have
done something else. And again, I’m not sure they believe me, but
that is my own best estimation of such a time-travel experiment
with my own growing up.
So, I know that given the right environment, the art of
truly meaningful conversation and the joy of learning and growing
in wisdom are within the grasp of most individuals, and not just a
privileged elite. It may be of interest to note that the majority of
students in the Hutchins program are women. There are more
women than men in the student body as a whole at our university,
but the ratio is even higher in Hutchins. I will not try to infer
anything about gender and the attributes of learning communities

405
myself (I’ll leave that to sociologists), but it is interesting to
ponder, nonetheless.
Another demographic group well represented in our
program are so-called re-entry students. These are students who,
for whatever reasons, left off formal education at some point in
their lives for a number of years and are returning. Sometimes
they began their post-secondary education at a junior college, took
some general education courses, and are now seeking a bachelor’s
degree. Not infrequently, if they did take formal education after
high school, they found themselves in all sorts of disparate life-
situations for a long time. They have worked at a variety of jobs,
blue collar and white, salaried or hourly, have raised families, and
experienced parts of the entire spectrum of adult life. They come
back to school for a variety of reasons as well. Some simply have a
felt need to complete a degree, both for professional opportunities,
and to express a measure of personal courage that they can take on
something significant and see it through. A number of them have
reached a point in their lives, in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, when they
are eager to intellectually explore in a space and for a time set aside
406
to do that. As you might expect, their levels of anxiety and
apprehension that they can actually do this can be quite high.
From my first encounter with these students, these older
re-entry students, I was moved by their courage and desire. They
have been among the most interesting individuals I have worked
with, and, having seen much of the world already, they can make
astounding connections and find breathtaking insights in deep
reading and conversation in a learning community. They are also
more apt to be completely expressive of the joy of learning, of
how the world has opened up for them, both because of the
contrast between such a life and the years of slogging they had
thought pretty much defined what it meant to be an adult. They
also frequently experience an even greater shock in the recognition
of their own abilities than do the traditional-age undergraduates.
Without recounting the many personal examples of
individuals I’ve worked with as teacher and mentor who have told
me of their fundamental life-changing experiences, let me just say
that so far I have found no upper age limit on individuals who

407
hunger for knowledge, wisdom, and can succeed magnificently
during their tenure as students. Many ask me for suggestions of
professional and educational pursuits they can follow after
matriculation that will allow them to continue both their
explorations, and enable them to pursue work that will invite their
insights and spiritual wisdom values, as well as for ideas for
research projects and internship programs commensurate with
their passions. I do my best to help.
For those who go on to do academic graduate work
(sometimes because they really hope to be able to teach in a
program like Hutchins), they often succeed quite well, but very
often they return for visits with reports that what is considered a
seminar discussion at these other, highly respected, institutions is
quite different from their earlier experiences. They find a less-than-
enthusiastic reception for their analyses and questions of the very
postulates of a given academic field, and are generally told to
master the catechisms of the professions as already defined, an
apprenticeship that will take years, before they are allowed to add
their own piece of layering to the prevailing dogma.

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Many of our students also return for visits expressing a
longing to find community where they can continue the “great
conversations” that they found so life giving. In the last few years a
number of our students have begun to form various associations,
face-to-face, on-line, during their student years and after
graduation, where they can continue their associations. I do my
best to inspire my students with confidence, enthusiasm, and most
of all with visions that the world is changing. There are places for
agents of positive change and visionaries. When students seek me
out for advisement about specific things they might do, perhaps
continuing their studies, perhaps finding a niche in the workforce
where they can find meaning and not just wages, I do my best to
think this out with them and suggest resources, and sometimes
personal connections in the outside world who would be receptive
to their enthusiasms. However, there are always a few students
who, when they come back to visit, have found gainful employment
but not a conversational wisdom community. Indeed, I realize this
vacuum is not often easy to endure.

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We are living in a culture driven by its surrogates. There
are visionaries scattered among us, but often they are not in
sufficient numbers or proximity to foster conversational wisdom
communities. I am not suggesting that everyone quit their jobs and
join a commune outside the boundaries of mainstream society. In
fact, I am hoping for the exact reverse. We might become a more
grateful, reflective, conversational, and wisdom-seeking and
wisdom-applying society. My fondest vision is that we might
embrace dispositions as a primary theme of what we consider to be
the good life for the mainstream. It is possible. I know we can
expand our visions of what we seek and why beyond the
surrogates of flatland, because I have seen it happen personally, in
microcosm.
The rest of this chapter, and indeed the book, are ideas and
impressions to help this vision along. I am not alone. In fact, I am
greatly encouraged by the number of individuals and groups who
are already acting to realize societies and communities that will
allow for greater and deeper satisfaction as we put our efforts into
them, so that we will not be either overcome by ennui, or like so

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many anxiety-ridden grasshoppers, as Scott Russell Sanders put it,
leaping “from notion to notion.”
iii) Keeping track of your life and telling stories
There isn’t a specific order to creating a conversational
community. As mentioned above, for many of the students I’ve
worked with, they were simply immersed in it by virtue of having
enrolled in the Hutchins Program. We have tried to improve the
information disseminated about this program, but we still have
quite a few students who enroll thinking they were about
something very different from what they ended up doing, and quite
surprised by the experience. In addition to the radically different
experience students have in a learning community, there is also the
very transformative experience provided by being able to set aside
a time in life specifically for learning and personal change, and this
is a disjuncture that is universal for all students leaving home for
the first time. I try to emphasize that it is a positive disjuncture to

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be embraced and not just a disequilibrium to be endured until they
are comfortable in their new setting.
I find this deliberate change in life patterning so powerful
an opportunity that I wish to have it available not just right out of
high school, but at regular intervals later throughout life. I see
regularly, first hand, the transformative experience of older
students who return to school and have given themselves time for
contemplation, learning, good conversation, and re-evaluation. The
positive effects are so profound that, if I were to make any
pronouncement on social policy at all (which I am loathe to do), it
would be for at least the consideration that in the twenty-first
century we think of mainstreaming ways for adults to re-enter the
academy. (And I am thinking specifically of the Learning
Community model here.) Not for technical upgrade courses for
their current employer’s immediate needs, but for a kind of
workers’ sabbatical to have the freedom to think grandly about
life’s ageless mysteries, in the presence of similarly engaged
individuals from different backgrounds.

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I think that if we were to consider at least making such
opportunities an option for many working adults, without penalty
(they can return to their jobs after a semester, for example) in
much the way we have been evolving things like flex-time, daycare,
and maternity leave, the benefits to society would be beyond
imagining. Such worker’s sabbaticals would be the sort of
environment that would most profoundly invite envisioning, and
on a very large scale. For all the think tanks, business consultants,
and CEOs who keep saying that they really ARE looking for
creative individuals who know how to work well with others, and
have the ability to really “think outside the box” of what is, there is
nothing currently being touted by any of these so-called agents for
new thinking that would even remotely compare to the creative
possibilities that would come from a society that embraced regular
involvement in learning communities as a benefit.
Of course, the real changes that I can dimly envision are
beyond the corporate bottom line. I see regular sabbaticals in deep,
wisdom-seeking conversation as one of the best ways to help
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community, and of seeding further conversations, beyond the
academy, with wisdom rather than mere technique. I see this not as
some conforming of public opinion to a national religion, but
rather as the most lovely way to express and embrace the maximal
diversity of visions, ethics, and ways of living. And best of all, we
would become known to each other, and to ourselves, and this
knowing is the very heart of empathy and wisdom.
Let me return for a moment to the humble experience of
the classroom, by way of introducing one curricular exercise that I
feel I can recommend wholeheartedly, without any reservation, for
anyone at all. It speaks directly to the topic of this section, namely
keeping track of one’s life and telling stories. A minimal amount of
background is needed here. In the lower division (first two years
for students entering at the freshman level) of the Hutchins
Program we have a four semester sequence, which when taken in
its entirety can stand for most of the general education
requirements of the university (with the exception of
mathematics). These courses are very intensive in every respect,
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lot of time with the teacher. In 1998 I first taught the second
course, which we call “In Search of Self.”
This course, taken by second semester freshmen,
investigates the history of conceptions of the self. It includes the
ancients; the invention of the concept of the modern rational,
autonomous and interior self (e.g., Descartes, Shakespeare); the
Darwinian concept of self; the early twentieth century
philosophers of the conscious and unconscious (e.g., Freud, Adler,
Jung); a tour of contemporary neuroscientific theories of
perception and thinking; and the postmodern constructions. Yes, it
is a lot, but then again, these inquiries comprise nearly the entire
workload during the semester for a student in this program. That
is, this single course is twelve units. The final project requires the
students to write their autobiography, with the intent that the
insights they have gained throughout the semester will open their
understandings of themselves to enrich that autobiography. This
final project is not easy for the students. These autobiographies are
typically about thirty pages in length. When I look back on my
own state of mind, to the best of my recollection, at age eighteen, I

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don’t think I would have had all that much to say about who I
thought I was, and how that fits into some worldview. Nonetheless,
these students were able to do it, which was just one more bit of
evidence to me of the broad availability to wisdom when properly
nurtured and encouraged.
The autobiography is a most profound project for these
students, and they all report that it is like nothing they have
experienced before. They complete these autobiographies as their
final project, and so it also coincides with the end of the semester,
with the end of their first year in college, and with a host of other
changes they have experienced since leaving home. I told my
students I hoped this attempt to understand their lives in a
meaningful narrative would just be the beginning. They have
viewed their lives as creative works in progress, and they have
assessed just what that trajectory feels like right now, what they
think they have learned, how they have truly become different
creatures at different stages in their lives.

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And then I tell them that I, too, continually write my
autobiography. I do not call it my autobiography; I call it my
journals, but I have kept writing journals for the last twenty-five
years, and have increased the amount of writing over time as my
experiences have become both broader and deeper, as my insights
have interleaved. I am sure that there are countless individuals who
have led meaningful, authentic, and insight-filled lives who have
not written journals. It is quite possible that there are individuals
who are able to discern their meaningful life patterns, to
comprehend the wisdoms they have gained within a dynamic and
unfolding narrative without ever having committed those
reflections to paper. Of course, we all know of people who are, for
example, natural born athletes and seem able to do all sorts of
things that the majority of us could only imagine approaching with
insistent training, if at all, and the same holds true for a host of
other gifts. When I encourage my students to make a life practice
of writing down their experiences and insights, it is simply the
best advice I can give for awakening them to their true desires and
potentials, and to ensure they are never left in existential distress

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over what their lives add up to. One might account my passion for
journal writing with an intellectual deficiency on my part to just
keep everything in my head, without the additional experience of
writing out my life as it presents itself.
However, I think that one of my gifts in life is that
relatively few things, academic or otherwise, came with a natural
leg-up, and so in doing almost anything that I have applied myself
to, I have always had to give a lot of thought to what needs to
happen in order to do it. This description of my learning process is
not false modesty on my part, I really mean that, just as it is not
false modesty when I confess to many of my students how much
more mature and insightful they are than was I at their stage in
life. I have been around many people in many disciplines for whom
my situation was quite distinct from their own, so I know what I
am talking about. This experience has caused some painful
recognitions on my part. At this stage in life, I think that my
shortcomings have actually been a profound blessing in what I do,
though they did not seem to be anything of the sort for many
years. I was raised to think that I could literally do anything, if I

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just applied myself to it. I know that my parents meant well, but I
am not so sure that mantra is always the best thing to tell a child.
After I began studying physics in earnest, for example, I
was grittily determined that I would master that subject and its
attendant disciplines. I did all right, but I was not the star of the
department by any means. Still, I would work in my study carrel
for hours on end, many times until dawn. Finally, there came a
realization, near the end of my undergraduate years, that I had
reached a level of sophistication where I could see that some of my
peers, while still working hard, were also intuitively seeing their
way through these problems in a way that I would never be able to.
There is an area of mathematical analysis used by physicists called
tensor analysis, and when I hit this conceptual tool, I was stunned
by the divergence between my experience and some of my peers’.
When solving a single problem, I would sometimes write out in
very small print, complete descriptions of exactly what a particular
line of mathematics meant, what was in it, and why I was using it.
Three fourths of my worked out homework problems were prose,
interspersed by equations. I would also write out all of the

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simplifying reductions of a series of equations, even the arithmetic
ones, not leaving them out as “obvious” as everyone else did.
I was blessed at this time (and that truly is the only word I
can use to describe the following encounter) with a friend by the
name of Gordon Wright. And Gordon, wherever you are right
now, I want to once again thank you for your friendship and
humanity. At this level of study it was allowed and even
encouraged, for us to get together and work jointly on our
homework assignments (of course, we couldn’t do the same on
tests), and Gordon approached me one day and suggested that we
get together regularly in my study carrel, which had a blackboard,
to work on our homework. Gordon was warm, humble, soft spoken,
and self-effacing. He didn’t think there was anything special about
himself. However, when we began meeting in the evening to work
on our problems in tensor analysis and theoretical mechanics, we
would both begin hunched over our textbooks and notebooks at my
desk, but soon Gordon would take the problem to the blackboard.
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Gordon didn’t talk fast; he would always explain what he
was doing, and he never, ever, lost patience with me. I would sit
there amazed at how he could see, intuit where a mathematical line
of reasoning should go next. When we were done, I would always
understand everything that we had done, (sort of reverse
engineering), but I was astounded by his understated ability to
know when and how to make a conceptual leap. More than once,
after several hours of exhausting work (for me, trying to keep it all
in my head and make sense of it) I would say to Gordon: “This is
really wonderful, but I don’t understand why you want to work
with me. I mean, Gordon, I really don’t think you need my help,
and to me it seems I am always the one who learns from you, non-
stop!” It was true, and it was Gordon who showed up at my door,
like clockwork, asking when we could get together next to work on
that week’s problem set. To this day, I honestly feel that Gordon’s
presence and friendship was a pure gift, and a divinely inspired gift.
I have no other way to describe or make any sense of it. In later
years I have come to see that episode, and there have been many
others where I needed help and suddenly, when I was out of

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options, a gift appeared. In many ways, Gordon was very much like
Clarence, the angel who came to George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful
Life.
This episode provided some very deep insights to me, which
have stayed with me to this day, and which also seemed to be
completely outside of what Gordon thought he was doing (at least
as far as I know, but then again . . .) During this time I was
confronted with my own limitations. These were not socially
imposed, or due to being raised by demeaning parents. Quite the
opposite. Here I was, twenty-seven years old (I had left college
several times, and changed majors), and I was still operating under
the assumption that I was every bit as capable as anyone, as long as
I applied myself rigorously, and that whatever field I would
become master of was simply a matter of my personal preference.
I don’t think that any psychologist would say that someone with
such a view of himself was suffering from low self-esteem! I had
been able to keep this view of my abilities and myself reasonably
intact up to that time, and that even included all sorts of
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understand certain concepts better and quicker than I did. I had
maintained this precious, and flawed, view of myself. But finally,
the dam broke, and I was confronted with a brutal fact: I cannot do
absolutely anything just as well as anyone else.
It took some time to absorb this new observation, but its
after-effects were absolutely invaluable. I had already been keeping
a journal by that time, but I began writing wildly, with flashes of
new insight. On the formal level, I wanted to understand how
Gordon, and others like him, understood things that I couldn’t.
What was he thinking and how? I believe I actually asked him this
question directly on several occasions (“how did you think to take
THAT step, at this point?”), but that approach didn’t help much.
Gordon would look at me, a bit puzzled, and explain again what he
had actually done on the blackboard. He was not being coy or
condescending (both were completely out of his nature, and he
couldn’t be condescending if his life depended upon it).
And so I realized that there was something different going
on in Gordon’s mental landscape than was going on for me. I

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decided that at some level, and maybe subconsciously, people like
Gordon were able to work with mathematical abstractions almost
as images, and that arriving at a certain juncture they could
somehow perceive, actually see, a spectrum of possible branches of
logic all at once, weight them, and intuitively be drawn in a certain
direction. I even came up with a term for this mode of thinking. I
called it “spatial reasoning,” by which I did not mean the literal
spatial imagination that psychologists refer to as one of the
“intelligences.” I meant the ability to hold a number of ideas
simultaneously, and in abeyance, until they were pulled out of this
manifold of below-conscious possibilities in a certain direction.
I also realized that, at least in the disciplines of physics and
mathematics, I was not one of those individuals whose deep
structure of problem solving worked this way, and I had to come to
terms with realization. I did get through that course, and others,
and I think that to have studied for so many years and not finish
my degree would have been psychically destructive rather than
instructive. But I now had a very different appreciation of lived
experience, and developed an openness to being instructed beyond

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what my own predetermined goals drove me toward. I did a lot of
journal writing. I came to better understand my strengths in
teaching, which were in no small part due to my limitations.
Having concepts not arrive easily or intuitively and out of
the blue in my chosen discipline, I was extremely sensitive to all
the ways a person could misunderstand. I found that I did have
very strong intuitions, but these intuitions were of an empathetic
sort. I found that I could anticipate what it was that a student could
not understand in developing some concept, and that I could
vocalize this difficulty even when the student him- or herself could
not quite understand what it was about that concept which they
didn’t understand. I found that I could also visualize analogues and
examples that might help a particular student at a particular
juncture. I came to have a much more profound appreciation for the
variety of gifts with which individuals are endowed. These
insights, much of which I set down with great energy in my
journals, set the tone for the next two decades of my life.
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But what do these personal reflections of my own education
have to do with my freshman students who had just written their
autobiographies? I was urging them to use this major writing
effort as a grand beginning, not as a project to be tendered for
credit. The bright recollection of major transformations I had
experienced at their age was most powerful, and the fact that I had
written intensively as those transformations worked themselves
out, and that this writing had both enabled me to understand my
struggles and to find my way toward new, rich visions as a result
made me most desirous that they might find joy and wisdom in a
similar attention to writing their experiences as a life practice.
There is something of extraordinary power, in my
experience, in writing down one’s experiences, insights, goals, life
changes, decisions and their reasons. There is something very
powerful in respecting one’s life as a creative work-in-progress.
When I write down my best insights, my profoundest hopes and
dreams, my current wisdoms, whatever they may concern, the page
seems to speak directly back to me as though it were another self.
My journal is a spiritual wisdom companion. It has never left me

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bereft in life, so long as I uphold my part of the sacred relationship
with this friend, and that is that I will attend to it, learn from it,
and always be as honest as I possibly can about any difficulty, crisis,
plan, or insight. There is also something about having accumulated
these thoughts on paper, in binders, which gives me a sense of
motion, meaning, and the ownership over what I create and do with
my life.
Sometimes I go back and read sections of my journals from
years past. It helps to restore that meaningful life narrative that is
so important to me. Often I don’t need to go back and read them
because the effort and attention of having written these
meditations, and their physical presence in notebooks on my
bookshelf bring them back to life just by see their binders. The
very writing process brings such clarity, such wonderful new
insights, that I am constrained to believe that the very act of
keeping track of our lives is a sacred practice which makes us
available to wisdom that we might otherwise discount, or never see
in the first place. It enchants life itself. It deeply inspires gratitude.

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In years past I have often tried to leave my students with
some bits of wisdom, sometime in a semester, of things I think are
important. At times these pieces of advice from the older
generation began to get a little too numerous. Keep learning. Look
for ways to improve your world. Be grateful. Don’t hang around
with jerks that revel in their “heroic” despondencies and
pathologies: it is an easy air to affect; it doesn’t inspire visions, and
their cynicism can infect you. Remember, true empathy is the art of
true understanding: do not reject people, epochs, or groups out of
hand because in some way their worldviews made some sort of
sense. If you want wisdom, you must be able to understand in this
way, across distances of time and culture. Always seek out worthy
mentors and try to understand their wisdom without becoming a
disciple; and as you go through life always look for opportunities
where you can be a mentor to others, and their questions will help
you maintain your own integrity. Conversation, about things that
matter, engaged with empathy and understanding, produce wisdom
and lift everyone involved: seek to make such conversation a part of

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your life. Cultivate an irreverent sense of humor, and indulge in it
frequently: few medications are as powerful as aerobic laughter.
I have now come to a place where I must trust that these
bits of advice have already been spoken, by me and others, even
during a particular semester, and if they didn’t hear or notice all of
them now, they will encounter them time and again, so long as they
live with intention and awareness. The students will hear (or not,
depending on what they are able to find a place for at their
individual stages of maturity). As the saying goes, “when the
student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I do not, however, need to
feel some frantic urge to pack my students off with a laundry list
of everything I hope they will embrace. They are capable of
insight; they will have their own experiences, and being in my
classroom has been just one of many experiences.
So, I have pared down my parting advice to just one thing:
keep a journal. I even promise them, as I do the reader, that if they
write their lives, regularly, with honesty, and cherish the gift of the
processes of living, they will be safe. Not safe from an accident, or

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an illness of any sort, or even from sadness. They will be safe from
the worst of all fates, of having lived many years and having the
dam break one day, leaving them with no answer as to what, of
worth, they have been doing all this time. They will never, no
matter how difficult things may become, find that their lives are
meaningless. In short, they won’t be tempted to jump from a
window. In looking honestly at the desires and insights of one’s
life, and incorporating that wisdom into decisions of what to do
next it is never too late to start (that is, regardless of the ages of
the students, from 18 to 80), but it is always too late to knowingly
put it off. Again, I do not say as some sort of threat that if they do
not do this thing that they will have a miserable or crisis-filled life.
I am only saying, that from my experience, it is the single best
piece of advice I have in building a foundation of a meaningful life.
iv) A note on mortality
There was another activity we engaged in, in that freshman
course I mentioned above, “In Search of Self.” At the beginning of

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the semester, before they had gotten into all the readings, I asked
them each to do a little overnight exercise, and to bring it to the
next class. That exercise was to write their own obituary. I did not
originate this idea. I got it from some colleagues, who in turn got it
from a book by Deena Metzger. Before we go any further, let me
ask you to consider your own reactions to this exercise. How did
you feel when you read it? Did you imagine yourself being given
such an assignment, and if so, what were the first emotional
responses you experienced? What can you infer from your
reactions, whatever they were?
When I told my students of the exercise, there were a
variety of responses from the classroom. There were some puzzled
looks, and at first there was silence while they took the words in.
Then, there were some of the functional questions students ask,
sometimes because they want clarification and sometimes because
it is just something to do when they don’t know what else to say.
“What’s supposed to be in it?” “How long does it have to be?” Then
there were a few who looked slightly ill, with comments such as, “I
don’t like this; it sounds so morbid. It’s depressing. I don’t want to

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think about dying!” There were also a few who seemed engaged by
such an open-ended think piece, and their approval showed in their
faces.
I believe it was the late biologist and essayist Lewis
Thomas who first got me thinking about mortality, and the very
odd places we have sequestered it in our modern consciousness,
and the very unnatural and tortured way we respond to it, and I
recommend that essay to the reader (see the notes section). Deaths,
along with births, are the most natural of events in the human
experience. How can we possibly hope to make sense of our lives if
we are afraid to think about death? If the thought of one day
dying is some black hole, is an existential void which produces
anxiety or even terror to consider, then how is it at all possible to
think about life creatively, serenely, and with gratitude?
I am not about to tell the reader what happens after death.
The reason is simple: I don’t know. I have entertained all sorts of
thoughts over the years, and some have more resonance than
others, but over the long haul I think those very meditations, and
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certain readings on the subject, have given me joy and gratitude. I
must periodically consider it in the context of the life I am living,
record my thoughts, and seek accommodations and resolutions
where I do detect anxiety. When I have reached some insights,
which have changed over the years, that seem to be my best
wisdom on mortality at that time, I write about it in my journal
and see how it informs other thoughts and reflections I have been
writing about. However, I think we are making a critical mistake if
we maintain that we are seeking insight into how to live our lives
well, if at the same time we draw a rigid line at some life-phase
approaching the end of our mortality and say, “this far, and no
farther.”
Mortality is not some mistake of nature, and our failure to
be able to come to peace with it will invariably lead to all sorts of
distortions in our life. It is a most expected result, when acting in
denial of any big eventualities, to be anxious, confused, continually
wondering what to do next. Without considering and embracing
both life and its end, how will we become meaningfully engaged in
the art of living? It has been said that when Plato was asked what
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all his philosophizing was good for, he replied that it was
preparation for a good death. I have thought that collectively we
played with a culture-wide psychosis during all the years of the
Cold War, going on as if everything was fine, so long as one was
able to keep from thinking that our national purpose, and the future
of humanity, rested on the knife-edge of mutually-assured
destruction, the official name of the policy of nuclear deterrence,
also known by its most appropriate acronym, M.A.D.
And so the little exercise of having my students write their
own obituaries was not at all some gruesome experiment to
terrorize my students, and in fact it was precisely the opposite. It
was an invitation to think lyrically about their lives while they still
had almost all of it yet to come. What I was hoping for was that
the students would take this opportunity to think not so much
about what was going to come next, in the immediate future, but to
imagine what qualities they would like to think they would have
expressed in a life well-lived. And this is exactly what the students
ended up doing! I was not so much interested in their laying out in
fine detail what all their career moves would be, or positions they
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would hold. Rather, this assignment was an opportunity to
envision. We all know that we have some amount of time for our
mortalities. How much, we don’t know, but we can assume it is
something less than a century. What would we wish to have
expressed most during that mortality? Some of the students
fleshed out their obituaries with some homely details, such as being
a grandmother, or having helped some group or other, and even
these details revealed some wonderful virtues for community,
devotion, creativity, and integrity. But they also put down
wonderful qualities that they hoped would be apparent to those
who knew them.
If you have never tried anything like this, I urge you to. It
is a wonderful meditation for one’s journal. What sort of person
would express what you would consider a life well lived? Do you
feel a sense of purpose and composure as you write this out? Are
these things that you would really hope to embody also the sorts of
things you are giving time and energy to? Whatever you decide in
your heart of hearts, to actually write it down, to reconsider it
from time to time, and to act according to your best wisdom

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whatever your current circumstances, these are the sorts of practices
that constitute a life well-lived at that moment, and for every moment,
regardless of when our mortality calls us home. If you want to
sleep well at night, please try this practice.
The fact is that no matter who we are, we all have a life
narrative, and so far as we know the ability to construct a life
narrative is one of the great qualities that makes us human, as
opposed to some other species. And, as psychologist Dan P.
McAdams has so elegantly and persuasively shown through his
extensive research, we are always in the process of telling
ourselves what our current version of our life-story is. If we are
telling our narratives at some level, why not actively author them
as well? The little imaginary obituary exercise is one way to open
up our creative authorship, making our lives more than persistence
in the face of random events, but instead a considered work of art,
a work which we can see coming into focus as a daily process.
We may wish to create more than one work of art with our
lives, and it is wonderful opportunity to seize if we are able. Our

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visions mature with experience, and in the process so does the
composition of our lives. But if we are aware of our authorship,
and acting upon the best wisdom we can muster at a given time to
create our life stories, then we need never fear that the end of our
mortality is creeping up on us. There is no, “if I can just make it to
here” sense of when you will be fulfilled when you will have packed
away the contents of a good life. It is happening all the time. There
is no finer sense of eager creativity, joy, gratitude, and serenity, all
at the same time, than through realizing that you are aware and
acting according to your best lights, no one else’s. To seek
awareness and the courage to act is all anyone could ever expect of
themselves. It has nothing to do with social station, with
competition, or with any other surrogates that would have our
devotion.
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Chapter 8: Holography, Deep Practice, and Synthesis

(Thoughts on education)
i) Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom
I remember hearing from about the time I was in junior
high school that the amount of information in the world was
doubling at ever increasing rates. It had the same kind of feel to it
at the time (and I believed it in the same way) as the typical urban
or suburban legend, another being that “scientists had figured out,
for sure, that we only use ten percent of our brains, on average,
and even Einstein used maybe only fifteen percent of his!” This
second one has something very attractive about it; so far as popular
aphorisms go, it almost had the same kind of appeal as UFOs and
secret government labs holding onto unimaginable secrets from
otherworldly aliens. Except this one indicated that each and every
one of us harbored some kind of super ENIAC computer in our

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heads (because that was the sort of thing we equated with
brainpower when I was a kid, being able to instantaneously divide
strings of twenty-five digit numbers in our heads, and the like), but
for some reason (probably another government secret) we just
couldn’t figure out how to let this genie out of the bottle. And if
someone DID figure it out, just any ordinary person could
suddenly become a freakish intellectual equivalent of a nuclear
warhead, could do anything by sheer application of concentration,
and she or he could hold the rest of the world hostage! I even had
little passing thoughts myself when I was doing my homework,
like “where IS that other ninety percent?”
We had lots of those sorts of stories as kids, and I suppose
that is part of childhood, and each generation has its own legends
that take on the weight of fact which arise from whatever cultural
forms and symbols are available at the time. Nonetheless, I had not
heard that ten-percent/ninety-percent one for quite some time but
was quite surprised when I heard it about a year ago, offhandedly
mentioned by one of my freshman students! I guess some of these
are more durable than others, and can successfully be passed down
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from one generation to the next. In fact, I think I first heard it
from my own father, but it also seemed to be common wisdom
among my friends.
Although I didn’t have the critical capacity to distinguish
between the legend about Einstein’s brain and the doubling rate of
the world’s information (or the desire to critique them), there is
some basis for the latter legend. The only problem with it was that
no one ever seemed to worry very much about the meaning of the
word “information,” and when this legend was invoked it was
usually coupled with things like how long humanity had lived with
fire as its only technology, and then suddenly we had the steam
engine and telegraph, the cars and planes, and now we had rockets
and transistor radios, and if you just looked at the rate of
inventions, well, there you had it! Without a critical examination of
terms like information, knowledge, and wisdom, it was very easy to
simply be overwhelmed by all sorts of very different signatures of
our progress, whether inventions or the physical holdings of

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libraries and lump everything together as evidence that the
twentieth century was the apotheosis of human culture.
In this section I would like to make some distinctions
among the three terms: information, knowledge, and wisdom.
These distinctions are expressly to inform the discussions to follow
in this chapter, and so I reserve the right to define them as I wish,
Lewis Carroll style, rather than multiply dictionary definitions. In
any way one wishes to define it, the information that circulates in
society has been multiplying sharply during the twentieth century.
I recall looking at some old parts catalogues from
manufacturers of electrical equipment at the Smithsonian, from
around 1920, and they were slim little booklets with full drawings
and prices. Today, the catalogues for a single kind of electronic
device are the size of large telephone books, in fine print, and there
are many kinds of devices. One could fill a modest library with
such parts catalogues, and not just for electronic devices, but safety
codes for transportation, trade data, or known carcinogens. No one

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is expected to know all these things anymore although it was this
sort of information that formed a large quotient of what experts
were supposed to supply fifty years ago. Knowing information by
rote, and being able to report to others based on such familiarity, a
few generations ago, was a large part of what separated the expert
from the layperson. It was the core of their expertise. If an
electrical engineer were to go about memorizing parts catalogues
today, she or he would be looked at as very strange by other
engineers, and for very good reasons. A lot of information that
crowds our world is most useless, that is least available to others
who can make practical use of it, when stored in someone’s brain
instead of in a database.
With the exception of the rare statistical savant, most of
the information that circulates today, calculated as bits of
information, can only be useful to us when it is massaged and
interpreted by a computer. Satellites and monitoring equipment
supply meteorologists and oceanologists with huge quantities of
numbers that are, as individual data bits, absolutely

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incomprehensible to the human brain, even to Einstein if he were
alive and got off his behind and used all that idle wetware! As it
turns out, we have evolved to understand concepts better in some
ways than others.
A graph, being a picture, is easier for us to make sense of
quickly than a string of numbers that make up a graph. In fact, we
are now finding out that the more sensory-rich we can make data,
within certain bounds of sensibility, the more we can infer.
Molecular biologists and chemists today are using not only
graphics to explore new compounds, but even so-called force-
feedback mechanisms, where they can move molecular structures
around their computer screens in 3-D, and they can feel, literally,
by tactile “force-feedback,” whether or not one functional group,
(be it a new compound, a neurotransmitter, or an antibody) will
“fit” or bond with another. Let the computer do the physics
calculations that lie underneath these effects, and you get to play
with Legos! And why not? Computers compute! We can sense, feel,
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leaps that would otherwise be unavailable to a brain dealing with
numbers instead of images and tactile responses.
However, there is also a great temptation that comes with
these tools, as marvelous as they are. When data are available
electronically, it is very easy to produce meta-data. Say you are a
marketing analyst. You have all the raw data automatically
provided, whether the product is automobiles, soft drinks, or
cosmetics. Two or three keystrokes will give you a bar graph, in
color, arranged by age, income, gender, whatever. Another few
keystrokes will give you a map of the U.S., or Europe, or the world,
color-coded for sales hotspots, or growth areas. And for all we hear
about the exponential rise of computing power in the world
(measured in teraflops) or the amount of data storage memory, and
with all that electronic horsepower doing our impossibly huge
calculations for us (so aren’t we becoming one huge global brain?)
most of that precious calculating and memory power is being used
for the most mundane of purposes. We couldn’t have done these
calculations without the computers, absolutely. And so, if we did

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not have those computers, this information would not be collected,
manipulated, and reformatted.
Computational science can manipulate raw data to allow us
to do what we do best, and we can arrive at completely new
insights. I am always amazed with every new discovery announced
by astronomers and planetary scientists, and many of these
discoveries are not only the results of looking harder, although the
Hubble Space Telescope certainly can do that, but many of the
really fundamental new concepts are hidden in data that do not
become apparent without these extraordinary computational tools.
Unfortunately, NASA, the National Institutes for Health, and other
laboratories, as well as library information searches in the
humanities, all these combined are utilizing but a small fraction of
the total global capacity for data collection, storage, and analysis.
Perhaps here the old legend about us only using ten-percent of our
brains really does have a correlation in the electronic realm of
networked computers! Most computational resource is devoted to
figuring out who drinks Coke and who drinks Pepsi, storing
unfathomable iterations of redundant spreadsheets, and giving us

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pages on the world-wide web that can not only show everyone in
Belgium a picture of our cat, but they can hear it meow as well.
In short, our very capacity to move and manipulate data is
itself a surrogate activity. If almost any of the truly numbing
tasks of data accumulation had to be done by hand, we wouldn’t do
it, and we would find most of it no more dear for its absence. If
one counts information in bits, we are probably doubling it every
few weeks, at the rate the majority of information workers back up
another disc or copy an entire hard drive. And the vast majority of
it is junk which we think is necessary simply because it is there. It
accumulates like so much worthless genetic code, much of which
was never really useful to begin with. It doesn’t even amount to the
sort of information that one might use as an archeologist or
paleontologist, to trace the evolution of something interesting in
human thought. It is more like a genetic sequence that accidentally
coded for something like antlers on mice, never useful and long
since deactivated.
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If the information just stood alone, with no one attending
to it, this multiplication of data wouldn’t matter very much. We
haven’t yet reached the state where information requires no space
or material at all, so one might bemoan the fact that we are wasting
plastic and silicon in making so many data storage devices, but that
isn’t really all that important. What is important is the extent to
which we give our lives over to it, to worrying about it. And what
is also really important, from a quality of life perspective, is our
inability to tell the difference between information and knowledge,
and between knowledge and wisdom. It isn’t so much “good”
information versus “bad” information. “Bad” information, one
might imagine as erroneous, and with a few computational checks
and balances we might hope to be able to tell one from the other. In
fact bad data can be very informative. It is more the difference
between good information and just so much noise.
Good information ought to give rise to knowledge, not just
more data. That is, we can discern patterns, arrive at
understandings, truly think something that we didn’t think before
because its intimations were hidden from us. Still, knowledge alone
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is no guarantor of value when compared to information. A big
batch of data may indicate to one person all the best markets for
fast-food franchises, or for liquor stores. That is knowledge beyond
data. One person may use those results to invest in those markets,
or to advise advertisers to put up billboards strategically. The very
same knowledge might lead a different person to investigate
further, and see if there are other collaborative reasons why such
markets exist, and then see if there is some social pathology at
work that might be ameliorated. Same data, same base-line
knowledge, very different trajectories.
My own definition of wisdom is “empathetic knowledge.” It
is the quality of empathy, I think, which allows one to perceive not
merely patterns, but meaning, and hopefully, when possible, to act
on that meaning appropriately. Empathy applies not only to the
personal and humanistic realms although it certainly applies there.
Empathy, or the ability to literally transpose oneself into a
different circumstance, applies even to the sciences. This is the sort
of intelligence evinced by the late Nobel laureate Barbara

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McClintock. Her insights into gene-hopping, or the ability for
genetic information to actually move to different chromosomal
sites, required not just information through experiment, and not
just knowledge of being able to discern informational patterns, but
it required her to actually transpose her consciousness to existence
at that microscopic level and make sense of options, possibilities,
and strategies.
In my experience the expression of empathy has often
taken place in the classroom, as I discussed in the previous chapter.
Due in part to my own difficulties in mastering certain ideas, I can
sense not only when students are having difficulties, but also what
they might be. Often, however, these intuitions are not even specific
examples of my own stumbling blocks. I cannot describe exactly
how this occurs, and I have no idea how to codify what it is that I
experience when I experience this intuitive transposition into the
thought patterns of my students. The best word I have for this is
empathy (not sympathy), and it is more than a history or catalogue
of my previous experiences brought to bear at the time of
student’s intellectual tension and subsequent release into new

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understanding. What I seem to experience in such encounters is
not amenable to a flatland description, it is dynamical and more
than the sum of its parts (e.g., what students are actually able to
verbalize, or watching their body language, etc.).
It is most fascinating to me that the current lines of
research into the presence and nature of intelligence, whether
human or other species, are all including in their definitions of
intelligence both qualities I’ve described above. That is, these
researchers are looking for signs of inference and pattern making
(as opposed to a simple stimulus-response mechanism to repeated
data), and empathy (the ability to first have a sense of self, and then
to build on that to infer the inner states of another organism).
This kind of transposition, out of the realm of the given,
the obvious, the particulars of one’s own immediate experience, is
imaginal and empathetic. It is wisdom when applied intentionally
and with integrity and gratitude. It allows us to be the authors of
meaningful lives. It is essential to acquire if we wish to be truly
awake to our potential, to our full humanness, to continually create

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one’s life rather than just living one out. It is also through this
acute awareness that allows us to truly transpose ourselves to the
other, that also allows us to see what is really happening all around
us, and not just notice the abrupt changes, or the dog walking on
its hind legs. Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it: “The aspects of
things that are most important for us are hidden because of their
simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something
because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his
enquiry do not strike a man at all.” Sometimes, when I wish
students to understand what I feel Wittgenstein is reaching for
here, I might pose a deliberately wild question or two which don’t
have an answer, as such, but which get at how profoundly affected
we are by the most pervasive aspects of living. “What might
Beethoven have written if gravity, instead of being what it is on
earth, were only half its strength; or twice that; or the sky
normally green instead of blue?” What, indeed?

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ii) On holography: a possible framework for envisioning
Ultimately, this chapter is intended to propose some ideas
on education. The previous pages preface that discussion by
examining qualities of understanding, and in particular the
essential differences between information, knowledge, and wisdom.
It is my hope that, already at this stage, the reader is disposed to
value wisdom as I’ve described it, and that above all we wish to
achieve some measures of wisdom, and we would wish the same for
our children and for others’ children. And there is a hierarchy here.
Perhaps it is not requisite in absolutely everything, but in many
realms one must have a certain amount of information (otherwise
one is not in possession of anything but someone else’s opinion);
then it is necessary to acquire some knowledge based on
information (especially for experimentation, which requires
fashioning knowledge from information). When one is in
possession of many different kinds of knowledge, one can
synthesize that understanding and, by reaching beyond flatland to
find empathy and gratitude, refine knowledge into wisdom. It is

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not a linear process. There is much back and forth, and life
experiences, great and small, keep returning, heuristically,
informing both what we know and what we mean.
How do we teach wisdom? Certainly, the most important
aspects for anyone are exemplars of wisdom. But when speaking of
wisdom, as nice as that sounds, isn’t there the danger that one
person’s wisdom doesn’t necessarily comport with another person’s
wisdom, even on the same topic of consideration? I would agree
that there is that possibility, and we must take care not to conflate
wisdom with dogma. Dogma can be codified, memorized, and
tested, just like any information can. Wisdom requires the active
searching and seeking of each individual. Guidelines can be told,
whereas wisdom emerges. Analogies come to mind when
contemplating wisdom. It unfolds, it distills, it resonates, it
reinforces with serenity and gratitude, it is excited by challenge
and change, even to its previous conceptions. What, then, do we
teach while our students are ultimately about getting wisdom?
What kinds of information and knowledge are not only
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flatland? I have come to believe that there is actually great latitude
in what we might consider essential knowledge, and this intuition
comes from experience, and from an intimation that knowledge is
holographic. But first a bit of explanation is in order.
A decade or so ago, holography was not much part of the
public parlance, primarily because there wasn’t much commercial
use for it. Now, however, holographic images are found all over the
place, on credit cards and toy store items. These are basically
three-dimensional images, and when you change you viewing
angle, you can actually see around the imaged object, as though you
had the item itself in front of you and were to look at it from
different angles. The principles of holography were first elucidated
by the late British physicist and Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor in
the 1940's, but the techniques for actually making them was not
available until the 1960s since holograms required a special kind of
light produced by lasers.
When I was an undergraduate, I recall one friend of mine
saying that the laser “is a solution in search of a problem.” This

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was largely true at the time since the basic uses of lasers then
included things like drilling holes in steel, making wonderfully
straight lines for construction projects, and bouncing timed pulses
off the moon (the Apollo astronauts had placed a corner-cube
reflector array on the moon which will reflect light back to its
source, irrespective of alignment). None of these applications were
very interesting for a physicist or even a student of physics
because we all knew what was so spectacularly significant about
laser light, and these aforementioned applications were not making
use of that property at all. As far as we were concerned, the uses to
which lasers were being put were sort of the equivalent of using a
computer for a hammer. If all you see about a computer is that it
has a certain weight to it, and a hard case, you can use it as a
hammer to bang things with, as a paperweight, doorstop, or even
in place of a cinder block. And what was truly remarkable about a
laser is that it produced coherent light! This was absolutely amazing,
as I will explain below, and nothing else could do that.
The analogy to the computer-as-hammer was especially apt
and annoying to us, because the uses to which lasers were being
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put did not even include properties that the laser was particularly
good at. Lasers, in the 1970s, typically operated at an efficiency of
between one and ten percent. That means that if you wanted a
laser to generate a beam with a total intensity of 100 watts (the
output of the reading lamp you may be reading with now), you had
to put anywhere from one thousand to ten thousand watts of
power into the device. And yet when lasers were mentioned in the
popular press, they were always given the same sort of treatment
as nuclear weapons. A horrible potential had been loosed, a
potential death ray. If used properly it might be used in
microsurgery (good lasers), but otherwise it was going to be War
of the Worlds, with the United States and the USSR shooting
beams of death at each other. All the applications that journalism
and the public talked about were things like welding, the ability to
make straight surveying lines, or Star Wars weapons.
It was all seemed so unimaginative to us who knew what
laser light was in actuality. As for welding or burning steel plates,
why not just use a drill or a cutting torch? You could get a lot
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more done, for a lot less money, and infinitely greater efficiency. We
also had a joke that if you wanted to get funding for a research
project, just put the word “laser” in the proposal, since that word
seemed to have the same futuristic fascination with government
grant reviewers as it did with the public at large, even if you were
just going to use the laser’s power supply as a space heater in your
laboratory.
The laser is actually an acronym that stands for light
amplification through the stimulated emission of radiation. When
atoms are stimulated with energy from the outside (usually
through an electrical current or another light source), those atoms
have a choice of what they do with that energy. They can ignore it,
they can heat up (vibrate in random motion), or if the energy is of
the right level they can absorb the energy in their electron
configuration. If this happens, at some point in time, which is only
a statistical probability, they can release that energy in the form of
a photon, or particle of light. The color, or frequency, of the light
is determined by how much energy is released by that atom. This
of itself was nothing new. This is exactly how neon signs produce
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their light, as well as fluorescent lighting. This principle was
already beginning to be understood in the nineteenth century.
It wasn’t until the advent of the physics of quantum
mechanics early in this century that our perceptions of matter and
energy got truly strange, and it was one of the forecasts of
quantum mechanics that led to the laser. This was first implied by
Einstein, who didn’t even like, or believe, the implications of
quantum mechanics. In this case, the idea was that although for an
excited atom in isolation there is no way to tell when it might
choose to release a photon of light, if that same atom were in the
presence of an energy field which matched the energy it was
storing at the time, that atom would be “coerced” to release its own
photon of energy at that time, and the photon it released would be
“in phase” with the photon that stimulated it.
Think of ripples on the surface of a pond. If you drop a
pebble at the water’s edge, it will produce a rippling in the water
that will propagate across the surface. If you and a friend both
drop pebbles, each point of impact will be a source of ripples, each

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spreading out, and ultimately the two rippling patterns will meet.
If they happen to meet such that the crests and troughs of the two
wave patterns are in the same place at the same time, they are in
phase with each other. This is called constructive interference, and
they actually add to each other’s strength. In music, sound waves
are produced by each instrument, which meet and interfere with
each other producing all sorts of secondary patterns. Some results
of sound interference produce very pleasing results to the human
ear, and some produce a difficult tension for the listener. The
pleasing interferences are called “consonant,” and the unpleasing
ones “dissonant.”
So, a laser was an instrument that could produce highly
monochromatic light (all photons of essentially the same
frequency), and that was neat, but remember neon signs do the
same thing. The really stunning quality was that all the photons
(or wavefronts) emerging from the end of the laser were also
completely in synch with each other in time and space! Except for
variations on this principle in different regions of the spectrum
(e.g. microwave “masers”) there wasn’t anything else that could DO

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this incredible feat of seemingly reaching into a beam of light and
getting all the photons to produce their energy variations in
lockstep with each other. This laser property was something
completely new in the physical world. We weren’t emulating
something already occurring in the natural world in a laboratory,
we were manipulating one of the most fundamental expressions of
the cosmos (light) in a way that had never been done, and that, as
far as we knew, nature had not done herself.
Can you see now why some of us were so dismayed when
people spoke of lasers as welders, surveyors, or ray guns? It was
this disjunction between knowing how remarkable were the
principles by which a laser organized the very nature and patterns
of light, and the uses to which the instrument was being put that
provoked what my friend meant when he said that a laser is a
solution in search of a problem. Here was this absolutely stunning
instrument, causing light to be, in every sense of the word,
coherent. Certainly producing coherence in light is the most
breathtaking thing of all. What can we do with such an

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instrument? How can we make use of readily producible coherent
light, what is it about coherence that begs for us to see what to do
with it? The essential quality here was order, a property of
information, how can we use THAT? If all you want to do is make
something hot, get yourself a magnifying glass and save your
money. In fact, in recent years we have begun applying these
qualities of laser light in the transmission of information through
fiber-optic networks, as well as in remarkable experiments into the
basic nature of matter itself (e.g., laser trapping and cooling
experiments of atomic-scale particles, done at the National
Institute for Science and Technology and elsewhere).
As it turns out the only actual application of this most
singular property in the early days of lasers (1960s) was to make
holographic, or 3-D, images. The first holograms were made using
a single color only (often red, since that was the frequency
produced by the most common low-cost laser, the helium-neon
laser), and it used the very coherence of the light to make
meaningful interference patterns of light when bounced off an
object. It compared the light waves from a single laser that is split
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into two parts or beams, one part being the reference beam and the
other being reflected off the object. These two beams are then
recombined, and the resulting interference pattern is used to
expose a piece of photographic film. Where the light is most
intense at the film, you get the most exposure, which shows up on
standard film (not print paper; this is the negative) as a dark spot.
If the two beams arrive completely out of phase, the produce no
illumination, or a clear spot. The early holograms, then, were
exposed transparencies, and if you were to look at it with the
naked eye under ordinary light, you wouldn’t see anything sensible
at all, just a sort of fuzzy wash. However, if that transparency
were then illuminated by laser light, the same sort of coherent
light used to imprint the information, you would see the image of
whatever it was from which you made the hologram. You needed
the information encoded by coherent light to imprint a hologram,
and you needed the same coherent light to get that information
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I remember we had a hologram (transparency) of a steam
locomotive in a display case, and as you walked back and forth you
would see the locomotive from different aspects, just like it was in
front of you. Furthermore, it looked really ghostly. The image
didn’t seem to be so much on the surface of the transparency; it
just seemed to be floating in space like an apparition of a toy train.
That was nifty, all right, but the best was yet to come. It
turns out that if you took one of these first holograms made on
transparencies and, with ordinary scissors, cut it up into pieces, say
into four pieces, and then illuminated these pieces with a laser light
source, you didn’t get one-fourth of the 3-D object in the original.
You got the entire holographic image, just smaller! So, if you took
that hologram of the toy locomotive and cut it into four pieces,
each piece showed the entire locomotive in 3-D, just like the
original, only smaller. And you could keep cutting it up into
smaller and smaller pieces and you would keep getting the entire
image. In other words, all the information to reconstruct the entire
object, was encoded EVERYWHERE on the film.

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This is obviously very different from normal photography.
If you take a snapshot of you and cut it in half, you get half of the
original picture, not a smaller version of the whole thing, and it
doesn’t matter whether you use the positive print, or the negative
(the actual developed film). In standard photography (or video),
what your camera and lens do is capture a certain part of the
image in the field of view (what you see in the viewfinder when
you take the picture), and the camera maps that information (how
light or dark, and with other technology we won’t bother with
here, what color) onto a corresponding part of your film or
electronic sensor. The smallest detail you can get recorded is
known as a pixel (from the two words, “picture element”), and each
pixel has its own unique exposure on it corresponding to what you
are photographing.
There is a natural limit to this fine structure of how much
detail you can get. In standard photography, an emulsion is made at
the factory where they make the film, using a compound of silver
which, when exposed to light, turns dark. (This is essentially the

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same process that makes your silverware turn black over time, if
you have real silverware). This emulsion is then dried and crushed
up into fine little bits, which is then impregnated into film or
photographic paper. Since these bits are actual microscopic chunks
of material, your detail is limited by the size of these chunks,
which is called the “grain.” But again, to reiterate, in normal
photography, when you cut up the end result, you don’t get a
smaller version of the entire photo, but just that portion of the
field of view that matches what you cut off, and this is not the case
with holography!
As long as one is using actual photographic film in making
a hologram, one is also limited in how finely one can cut up the
resulting hologram the physical dimensions of grain, but that is
not a product of the principles of holography; it is an artifact of
the physicality of the medium you are using to record the
hologram. It may seem a natural evolution that the very latest
research in data storage is an attempt to record information not as
little patches of magnetized material on a disc, but holographically
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I would like to pursue the possible implications (beyond
practical applications in industry or medicine) of holography for a
bit because they speak most eloquently to the notions I would like
to explore about information, knowledge, and wisdom, and
ultimately to a different conception to the processes and content of
formal education. However, I must say at the outset that, as
compelling and exciting as I find these ideas of holography, I am
not going to try to prove to the reader some absolute theoretical
framework of matter, thought, the universe, and everything.
Ultimately, I am skeptical that, even if such a model were
ultimately true, that it would be possible to “know” these things in
the way the sciences, mathematics and logic, and indeed all
intellectual disciplines variously comprehend provable knowing. At
a very fundamental level it may not be possible fully to know these
concepts (even assuming that they were the case) because we are
completely embedded in the systems and contexts we are
discussing. What appears vibrantly true at one level of connection
may be seen as simply a mapping translation when viewed from a

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different context. (Think of Sphere passing through flatland, and
Mr. A. Square’s very reasonable, though grasping, interpretations
of what he beheld.) It is with all of these admissions that I
continue, using certain observations, of which I am not the first,
more as highly attractive catalysts of vision and possibility.
One of the first individuals to become extremely attracted
to the implications of holography for other areas of inquiry was a
Stanford neuroscientist named Karl Pribram. As a very young man,
in 1946, Pribram had the opportunity to work with Karl Lashley at
the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology, and became acquainted
with the many years of research experiments through which
Lashley had tried to determine the physical location of memories.
It is a reasonable enough supposition that Langely had, even in the
age of computers. After all, when I type characters on my
keyboard, the letters are converted into a series of logical one’s
and zero’s (the ASCII binary coding scheme), and these are
converted from electrical on/off states in the memory chips of my
computer into small magnetized or unmagnetized regions on my
disc. It is actually possible to locate these, and in fact that is exactly

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what the moveable read/write head on the disc drive does, when
you load a disc into your computer, and you hear it sort of
chattering away while it looks for files you have asked for.
The period ending this last sentence is magnetically coded
into the disc on which I am storing this chapter, and if one wanted
to bother, it would be possible to actually find, with a ruler and
marking pen, the very small place on the floppy disc where it is.
After all the possible places on the surface of the 3.5 inch disc are
either magnetized, unmagnetized (including the essential spacing
between informational spots), my computer tells me that I can’t fit
any more on it, and if I want to continue writing I will have to put
in another disc. Exactly how my computer allocates the physical
area of the magnetic surface for data and decides on the
organization of this magnetic real estate is a bit more complicated,
but in principle, you can think of it very much the same as an old
vinyl LP record album.
The grooves of LP records carry indentations that the
record player needle reads as a mechanical vibration (the needle

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actually does wiggle around). The needle is connected to a tiny
magnet that converts that movement to an electrical variation in a
tiny coil of wire. The amplifier strengthens that variation, sending
it to a loudspeaker, which (acting rather like the pickup needle in
reverse) then vibrates according to the varying flow of electric
current and giving you sound back again. In reality, the LP record
does not have hundreds or thousands of grooves. It is really just
one, very long groove spiraled around and around at smaller and
smaller radiuses, until the radius is too small to produce useful
fidelity. That determines how long an old style record can play:
about thirty minutes maximum on a side. If you could unwind that
groove on one side of an old LP and lay it out straight, it would be
about three thousand feet long. It fits nicer on a twelve-inch disc of
vinyl.
So, no matter what storage medium one is thinking of,
whether printed matter in a book, a book in a library, a musical
passage on an LP, or some binary code on a computer disc, these all
take up some actual space, and they all actually reside at some
location. Why shouldn’t the brain operate the same way? (“Aha,
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here is the place in my brain where my fifth birthday party is
stored in my brain—when Aunt Sally came over with the red
wagon!”) If you were to remove that spot where that memory is,
the logic goes, I would have a blank there, and no memory of Aunt
Sally at my fifth birthday.
Working within that very linear paradigm of the brain as a
sort of “computer made of meat,” operating on making or
dissolving electrical connections mediated by chemical
transmitters, and the mechanistic assumption that information
takes up some space, no matter how small, and resides statically in
a location, Lashley performed a series of experiments. He trained
rats to be able to run (that is, learn) a maze. Then he operated on
them and excised various parts of their brains, to see if they could
still run the maze. (Ah, those behaviorists!) The results left Lashley
disappointed, as he wasn’t able to get any reliable results that
would indicate, at last, something like “here is what the rats learned
when they ran the maze, that information is located HERE. I have
removed it and now they can do everything else, but they have no
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recognition of the maze.” There was no simple correlation, as one
might expect when deleting a file from a computer memory.
Instead, the rats could still run the maze! Of course, one
might have disrupted things so much that the rats lost some
coordination, listed to one side, etc., or moved slower. But there
didn’t seem to be any positive correlation with brain location
removed and some specific piece of information. Instead, it seemed
more like memory was diffused somehow, or distributed
throughout the brain. Years later Pribram read an article
describing laser holography and had a flash of insight that perhaps
the mental functioning of those rats, and perhaps of all brains, had
more in common with the way information is encoded everywhere
in a hologram. Pribram was fascinated by this, and over the next
two decades further elaborated this idea.
In truth, I don’t know what status these ideas have at the
current leading edge of neuroscience. We have some amazing tools
at our disposal now, especially things like functional MRI scans and
PET scans that can watch our brains dynamically, that is, in the
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process of thinking. One primary measurement is to examine the
energy uptake by different areas of the brain as it does different
things. I am not trained as a neuroscientist, and I would have no
suggestions for how one might transform the mathematics of
physicist Dennis Gabor into something one might meaningful look
for with our current tools of brains-in-process. On the other hand,
as I have already said, this discussion of holography is not in
service of a proof of ultimate reality.
Some individuals have extrapolated this model of reality
very far indeed, and you can find references to some of them in the
notes section. I find the idea of a holographic reality to both the
physical and mental realms highly intriguing, and the very variety
of ways something like holography is expressed in our world I find
provocative. I would hope the reader is also intrigued, and will
accept the subsequent ideas we shall discuss as at least worthy of
consideration, and inspired by the considerations of holography,
not proved by those considerations.

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Are there, in fact, other examples in the natural world that
might be termed holographic? In fact, the world is full of them.
Take yourself, your physical body, as an example. You began your
mortal existence by the meeting of two gametes, an egg and a
sperm. In a wonderful dance these two cells joined and combined
information, and once they had done this joining and combining
they got on with the business of spreading the news. One fertilized
cell became two identical cells, neither one of which WAS the cell
from which it came, just perfect physical representations of their
parent cell. They were different entities, their physical structures
actually made up from all the nutrients in the mother’s
bloodstream. The two then became four, then eight, and kept
doubling, forming a spherical blastocyst of cells, all identical, but
comprising far more mass than the original egg and the
infinitesimal sperm.
Where was the parent cell? Nowhere to be found, if you are
looking for the original atoms and molecules as so many marbles to
be localized, tagged, and kept. The information is all there, but
what is that? The DNA chains are the artifacts of information,

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much as we use zeros as placeholders in a number, and the non-
zero digits not as things, but as ideas representing something else.
The sliding beads on an abacus are not numbers, or the results of
calculations, any more than they are bushels of wheat at the
marketplace. The beads are just beads, keeping track of something
very different. As physical beings, we are constrained to use
physical objects to help us keep track of things, ideas or wheat, and
we now prefer to use electrons instead of beads to keep track of
wheat.
As the cells of the blastocyst continue to multiply, they are
sharing information. There may be knowledge embedded and
immanent in this patterning activity, but it is not yet apparent
macroscopically. The growing blastocyst doesn’t look like much of
anything but a replicated pattern, which is interesting to see, but it
doesn’t manifest anything recognizable except a blob that grows by
adding more blobs. That is, without foreknowledge of what is
actually going on (and leaving out for the time being that we can
pry into the process microscopically and see the vibrating activities
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of mitosis in complete cells and meiosis in gametes) the growing
blob is no more surprising to the naked eye than putting detergent
into your sink and stirring it vigorously (with beaters) and seeing
an increasing layer of foam appear. If you get down close to the
foam you discover that it consists of thousands of tiny little
bubbles that are all pretty much the same.
Now, if you kept the eggbeaters going, you expect that
more and more of the stuff that was once water becomes foam.
Better yet, put a cup of water in a blender with a tablespoon or two
of detergent and turn it on high. What was originally clear liquid
that reached up two inches in your blender has become an opaque
foam that fills the whole container. The liquid you could easily have
poured down the drain, but the foam you now have seems to be of
a completely different nature. In fact, you can even sculpt it,
crudely, into a vertically standing shape. And again, no matter how
you sculpt it, if you look closely, it is just a bunch of bubbles, each
bubble looking pretty much like the others. Now, you are not
surprised that you can take a handful of this stuff and push it
around into a sudsy pyramid shape, or anything else. However, if

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you were to turn on your blender and you not only got the
expected foam, but after a minute or two the foam organized itself
into a scale model of the Statue of Liberty, you would be mightily
surprised. What if every time you tried it there emerged a statue?
Maybe not the same statue. Perhaps the next time you turned on
the blender you got Rodin’s “The Thinker.” Depending on your
predisposition, if this were to occur in your kitchen you might
immediately call the neighbors to confirm what you were seeing; or
the newspapers; or your local exorcist.
Now, contrary to popular belief (and all experience,
excepting the wonderful stories one finds on the large format
tabloids at the supermarket) such an eventuality is not impossible,
just extremely improbable. “Ah,” the reader may claim, “but what of
that thing called entropy which I’ve heard about? Are you not
flying in the face of that?” Entropy is a measure of disorder in the
physical universe, and the second law of thermodynamics states
that it inevitably increases. Things tend to disorganize themselves,
not organize. But there is an important caveat. Even if systems

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disorganize themselves when taken collectively and left alone, we
can still have increasing organization and structure at a local level,
but at a price. That price is energy. Plants are extremely organized
systems, but in the process of organizing their constituent
molecules to form a stem or leaves, they use a lot of relatively
disorganized energy from the sun accomplishing it. As long as you
put energy into a system, it is possible for order to arise, and in this
case your blender is putting in a lot of energy. So, obviously,
energy is required to create order out of disorder, but the mere
application of energy is not enough to reliably create order. Or in
the phraseology favored by physicists and mathematicians, energy
is a “necessary but not sufficient condition” for producing order.
But let us return to our incipient human, which so far to the
naked eye, or even with a magnifying glass, to the extent you see
anything at all it might look no more surprising than a little ball of
foam. At some point, something very much like the Statue of
Liberty begins to emerge. The sphere begins to fold in on itself,
producing a tunnel down its middle that will ultimately become the
morphologic structure of our alimentary canal, our entire

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digestive tract. But is each of the individual cells lining this crude
tunnel going to be precisely mapped into a cell in the lining of
your stomach? Don’t count on it. What is beginning to occur is one
of the most awe-inspiring creative acts in the cosmos: the process
of differentiation in developing organisms. There is some sort of
communication going on among these replicating cells, and the
process is still not well understood. Somehow, these cells are not
merely multiplying and dividing (early-on making exact copies of
themselves) and taking in not only molecules from the mother but
energy as well. They are also sharing a kind of collective wisdom,
telling each other what is going on throughout the entire colony of
cells, and telling each other when it is time for some of them to
mature and go off to accomplish a specific mission for an unfolding
process. As differentiation unfolds, some cells begin producing
offspring that are not mere replications of what they were. Rather,
some begin producing progenitors which start taking on the
physicality of what will become liver cells, or retinal cells, or brain
cells.
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And remember, every cell sacrifices its own individual
continuation when it divides and produces the next generation. If
we indulge ourselves in anthropomorphizing the life of a single
cell, we might shed a tear for its death, but celebrate its offspring.
In the early stages, the children are just copies of their parent cells;
but later on cells begin telling their children to become, for all
intents and purposes, wholly different creatures from what they
were. A trained physician or biologist has no trouble in telling a
dendrite from a liver cell from a muscle cell, biopsied from a child
or adult, under a microscope. Yet they all began the same. The coup
de grace of this stunning process, is that as distinct as each of these
differentiated cells have ultimately become, they all possess the
same information of their common ancestry, and who all of them
have become! There may not be a single molecule (again, if we
could tag and keep track of them like marbles) in the fully formed
human that actually existed in either the original egg or sperm.
But the information persists. Every single cell in the human body
(excepting the gametes which are the egg or sperm) contains ALL
the information that was used to organize EVERY PART of this

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complex organism. All information is distributed EVERYWHERE.
We, each of us, and every other living thing, we are all holograms.
In fact, we are much more interesting and mysterious than
photographic holograms as I’ve described them above, even on the
purely physical level. If you think back to the photographic film
hologram of a toy locomotive, all the information about the entire
object (the toy) is encoded everywhere on the film, down to the
level of the film grain, that is. So, you could snip off a little piece of
the film, illuminate it, and get all the information you need to either
see the full object, or to make another full sized hologram of the
full object. It is a fascinating property of information, but no one
would say that the hologram was alive in any meaningful way. It
doesn’t reproduce itself without a human agent. And when it does
reproduce itself (that is, we make a copy), that is all we get, a copy.
You never get anything else but the toy train back. If you had a
hologram of a toy locomotive and made copies, you would never
expect one of them to turn out to be a caboose, much less a whole
train, or a network of trains, switches, and tracks.

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We are not finished with our extended analogy quite yet.
We, living organisms, are even more amazing than a hologram of a
toy train that, through replication, began producing more
information than we imagined and suddenly began articulating an
entire system of railroads. We are holograms in process,
continually, which continue to change the patterns of what may be
represented as we go along, and we are still talking only of the
physical body. Our bodies continue to have subtle and profound
conversations within themselves, adjusting and readjusting every
cellular activity, and even our morphologies, as new information
comes in through our senses and we consume material (e.g., food)
outside ourselves.
And, for the last few decades we knew that we could (first in
theory and now in practice) read out the original information, or at
least the instruction manual for the information, from every cell in
the body. Until very recently, though, we didn’t know if we could
reconstitute the results of that information once cells were
differentiated, especially in such a complex organism as a mammal.
There seemed to be a unidirectional arrow of time associated with

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our holograms-in-process, that went one way only, not back again.
When we read out strands of DNA from mature cells, we are only
seeing the fossils of the instruction manual. However, with recent
successes in cloning, it now appears that we can not only recover
the standing instruction manual, but it is possible to reawaken
whatever creative impulse it is that actively makes the physical
process manifest.
iii) The romance of insight and the grand adventure of being
human
I need to pause here and make an observation, and this
springs directly from my classroom experiences with students. In
truth, most of my students have delighted, as do I, with ideational
excursions such as those in the previous section. However, there
have been students I remember who seemed to become
disheartened, at least temporarily, when discussing the insights
that scientific research has brought to bear on big topics, whether
cosmology or biology. To the best of my recollection the source of

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their disconsolation was that, in their opinion, scientific research
provided answers and removed romance and mystery from life and
the cosmos. It has been several years now since I last recall such a
response from a student, so perhaps I have gotten better in the
ways I can encourage such considerations. It is also possible that I
have become more taken by the emotional thrill of possibility as I
have grown older, not less so. In any event, I need to make that
case explicitly since I can’t quite see you, the reader, in my mind’s
eye, and I wish to take care lest you may feel similarly: that these
scientific findings and musings are somehow diminishing rather
than expansive.
I would not say that I couldn’t fathom the response of those
students, or that I had never experienced it myself. But it is no
longer the experience I have when learning of new advances in the
sciences. What I have encountered, however, are practicing
scientists and the writings of practicing scientists (not many, but
some) who do seem to inhabit the landscape of misunderstood
misanthropes, people who are getting the catechism right while
living amongst a population of the benighted who continue to get

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it wrong. I don’t want to dwell on this tendency among a few
scientists at this juncture, but I will take it up for a bit in the next
section because understanding why we teach what we teach, and
what we think is important to know are topics of critical
importance, and should be examined with care. What I wish to say
here is simply that the scientific disciplines are fascinating and
wonderful for the insights they bring, and they should be
encouraged in students by way of invitation into wonderful realms
of understanding.
Knowing that a sheep has been cloned does not in the least
diminish my awe at the miracle of life, and I can’t imagine feeling
that ignorance of some new insight, anything, constricts the
wonder of all that is, rather than multiplies it. The human
experience, both the life of the individual and the coursing of
human history, is an adventure of unfolding consciousness
magnificent beyond words. As intriguing and exciting as I find the
implications of holography, I can not say whether or not it
represents any sort of ultimate description of the world, mental or

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physical, but the creative departures I find in considering these
implications thrill me right now. It is the best I can do, at this time,
and all I wish to do in writing about it is to convey what is exciting
and compelling about that vision, and see what else comes of it.
We should give ourselves the license to imagine, to use
suggestive insights and analogies as tools to help lift us out of
flatland. If we let the insights of many fields of study and many
minds, past and present, inform our thinking, and catalyze our
creative imagination, we can contemplate new patterns which
transform what we do and why. This is the path of knowledge
becoming wisdom, through conceptual stretching, contemplation,
vision, and the manifestations of the heart’s resolve. It naturally
connects and permeates our separateness, and it naturally produces
empathy and wonder. This process is constantly revisited for new
vision and new wisdom. I suppose that it could also lead to a
“grand theory of everything,” to use the term that is the holy grail
of theoretical physicists and cosmologists. I only say that it could
happen, simply because I am ignorant of any law of nature that
absolutely rules out a grand theory, or the possibility of human

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consciousness comprehending it, not because I feel that one is
immanent in human understanding. In any case, it is the journey
toward wisdoms (deliberately plural) that seems to me so
powerfully significant and desirable. It is a spiritual trajectory, out
of flatland. Following that trajectory is to give heed to spiritual
passion, and it excites and satisfies at every moment, whether that
moment feels like puzzlement or plateau.
Giving myself this license, I would add some other
perceptions of holography. I have heard of many astronauts, once
afforded a view of earth from space, being profoundly struck by its
beauty and fragility. One astronaut commented that one thing one
immediately notices is that there are no boundaries, no lines
separating countries that we become so inured to looking at maps
or globes. It is just a contiguous whole teeming with life. If we
take a similar perspective, but on this floating globe trace out any
of the major systems, natural or man-made, we might find other
patterns as well. If we could highlight the systems of water flow
through land, rivers, streams, tributaries, underground flows, it

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would resemble nothing so much as the circulatory system of an
organism. If we were to illuminate all the channels of electronic
communications, or power grids, they would likely suggest a
nervous system. Such visions of implicate patterns suggest
themselves as we gain access to different perspectives, whether
viewing the earth from space, peering into a microscope or
telescope, from reading penetrating historical analyses, or from
insights into archeology and paleontology. We should welcome all
these perspectives and insights, and not be disappointed, but rather
excited, when our best insights show the shortcomings of a
previous grand theory.
Let me provide a brief biography of an idea as an example
of new insights, which, as they change our grand intellectual
models, should be celebrated and not mourned. At the turn of the
century it was a standard mental model in science to depict the
atom as a sort of solar system in miniature. In the late nineteenth
century physicist Joseph Thomson, in trying to ascertain what an
atom might actually look like but knowing that it was constituted
of positive and negative charges proposed the “plum pudding”

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model. It visualized the electrons (negative charges) as immersed in
a sort of atomic scale pudding of positive charge. That was soon
shown to be inadequate when Ernest Rutherford shot alpha
particles (helium nuclei) through a sheet of gold. To the normal
person, and indeed to Rutherford as well, a sheet of gold, or
anything smooth and solid, appears to be a uniform extension of
solidity.
Yet when he aimed his beam of alpha particles at the gold
and detected what happened (using a detector that works on the
same principles as the coating on the inside of a television or
computer screen, which produces an image when a charged particle
causes a small portion that coating to give off light) what he found
was that nearly all the alpha particles passed straight through the
gold foil and struck the opposite side of his detector as though
they hadn’t encountered anything at all along the way except
empty space. A few of the particles, however, didn’t just bend in
their trajectories a little or slow down (as though they were
passing through Thomson’s pudding), but instead these few

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ricocheted radically, some bouncing right back like a golf ball
bounced off a brick wall!
This led to a surprising and radical revisioning of what
matter was actually like at the level of the atom. This new picture
implied that what we see as solid matter is largely an illusion. The
word illusion here is literally so, since there are very good reasons
why matter, like a penny, feels solid to the touch, and why most
solid things are not optically transparent. But the new mental
picture of the world on the scale of the atom was now one of
almost entirely empty space (hence, the result of the alpha
particles that passed through unimpeded), where nearly all of the
mass of the entire structure is concentrated in one location, the
nucleus, which also happens to be where the positive electrical
charges are concentrated. So, in an uncharged atom there are equal
amounts of positive and negative electrical charge, but far from
being a gooey amalgam, like a pudding, most of the structure we
call an atom appear to the observer at that scale to be empty of
mass, but somehow the location of the negative charge.
Researchers couldn’t see this structure with the naked eye, or even
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with an amplifying of the senses through something like an optical
microscope. Instead, we had to send in informational emissaries in
for us, existing at the same scale, to tell us what they encountered
there in that realm, and those emissaries were helium nuclei, also
known as alpha particles.
This still left unanswered what sort of mental picture we
might form about that mostly empty space where the negative
charge resided. This investigation proved to be much more elusive
than Rutherford’s discovery of the nucleus and his little alpha
emissaries. I won’t detail the experimental history here, since that
is not the theme we are after, and there are any numbers of
intelligently written books for the layperson which in fact do detail
that intellectual journey. Instead, I’ll just mention some highlights
to get at our larger theme here, which is both the traces of
holography in the world, and their implications.
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr was one of the first out of
the gate in proposing a model for the entire atom. It posited that
the electrons were circulating this massive nucleus, and that they
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occupied shells of orbits, where these shells represented the
different levels of energy (not electrical charge, but something
very like kinetic energy, or the energy of motion). As it turned out,
this first shot across the bow of modeling the infinitesimal was
very useful, but short-lived. Physicists were, in working toward a
model of a whole atom, not trying to just pin down a fixed
structure that they liked. Instead, they were trying to understand
how and why atoms can emit light when excited, which they did in
very peculiar ways of specific colors depending upon the element
that was excited. (Recall our brief discussion of lasers earlier, and
in particular the discussion of neon signs and the like).
The problem with the simplified version of the Bohr atom
was that, according to the well-understood laws of classical
electrodynamics (the work of the nineteenth century scientist
James Clerk Maxwell), if these charged particles are orbiting
something, that very circular motion is the equivalent of
acceleration. And Maxwell had already demonstrated that
accelerating charges should be radiating energy, and radio
communications gave hard evidence of Maxwell’s theory.

491
Therefore, such a simple model would mean that all matter should
glow, and do that for a very short amount of time before all
electrons radiated away all their energy and collapsed into the
nucleus. In short, the very atoms that do exist couldn’t exist, with
this conception.
It was this very problem that was solved, over the course of
about twenty years, by the formulation of the quantum theory of
matter. Seldom has the world witnessed such intellectual fervor
within a single intellectual community, bent on the solution of a
single problem. Along the way all sorts of explanations and
visualizations were tried from such luminaries as Niels Bohr,
Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Max
Born, Paul Dirac, and Wolfgang Pauli (the “not even wrong”
character mentioned earlier). And what emerged was a theory that
turned out to be among the most revolutionary and powerful yet in
the history of human thought. In the first place, the new theory
provided a mathematical description (I am very cautious to avoid
the word mechanism here) that actually accounted for what the
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experimentalists had seen in their spectroscopic analyses of gas
discharge tubes (of which neon signs are one type). Secondly, it
gave birth to a host of other mathematical implications, which,
incredibly, have actually been born out over the decades as
experimentalists have struggled to come up with laboratory
translations of the implications of quantum theory that might
actually be put to the test.
The aftershocks of the quantum formulation continue to be
explored. Just as Einstein’s theories of special and general
relativity have fundamentally changed our notions of the
topography of space and time on the cosmic scale, the quantum
formulation once again revolutionized the topography of what the
nature of the physical world is, of what seems to us as the normal
world of matter in motion, and cause and effect, by examining the
world of the invisibly small. Among the implications of the
quantum formulations are included: the idea that what in gross
form seems to be solid object at the level of the very small appears
like a dance of the strangest kind, with the dancers expressing
themselves sometimes as particles (events) and other times

493
possibilities (waves); that two emergent properties (which we may
due to the limitations of language call particles), when separated at
birth, indelibly carry with them a knowledge (information) of the
other, no matter how separated they become in space and time, and
that their fates over time are somehow linked with some kind of
communication (again, this is just a word for convenience) keeps
them apprised of each other in a way that doesn’t respect the light-
speed limitation of communications as we know it; and that there is
no such thing as an objective observer. By this last idea, I mean
that we have learned that, at least when dealing in the realm of the
subatomic, the very ACT of observation changes the reality of
what one is presumably, and in very profound ways. Exactly what
you set out to find about, say, an electron, DETERMINES whether
that little entity will manifest itself as a wave or a particle.
Even further, when these little bits (as it is so easy to refer
to such things as electrons as though they were just unimaginably
small BBs) are exhibiting their waviness, that waviness knows no
bounds. Far from being a tiny localized ripple instead of a marble,

494
its waviness actually extends without bound. This leads us to ask
just what we mean by waviness. Should we think of an electron as
a little BB, but one that can also move around in curvy lines,
tracing out something like a carousel horse as it goes around a
nucleus like a planet around the sun, but going up and down as
well? If image came to your mind, you are in good company
because a visualization much like this was actually attempted by
Schrödinger and Sommerfeld in the early days of quantum
theorizing, even if only as a mental construct to help along the
evolution of theorizing by what were, after all, only human minds.
If only this highly visual model were so, we might still
somehow imagine a resurrected Aristotle or Galileo quickly
getting our new world views in an afternoon’s discussion where we
simply described the evolution of laboratory test instruments and
the wonders they revealed to the senses. But such is not the case.
What is doing the “waving” you ask, when we talk of matter
waves? The answer of what is wavelike, or doing the waving for all
we know, is probability. When we actually draw a picture, on a
blackboard, for instance, of the wave nature of matter the picture

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is, to be sure, nice and wave-like. But the axes of that chalkboard
picture that produces the nice wave are like none I’ve mentioned
before, such as when we discussed the sloping of a graph of
acceleration, like how a bowling ball picks up speed when dropped
from a roof. In those cases (thinking of a two dimensional graph),
the horizontal axis is the ticking off of time, and the vertical axis
represents how many feet the bowling ball has fallen by any
particular time. Even these examples are not quite as
straightforward as a bar graph depicting how much wheat or corn
is in several grain silos, where each bar is a silo and even looks like
one, but a graph of motion as I have described is one which
anyone, with a little practice, can get used to.
In a graph of a matter wave, the horizontal axis is not time,
but place. The vertical axis is not distance, but statistical
probability! What is waving around in a matter wave is the
probability that the entity you are talking about (say, an electron)
would be found if you were to impose your observational
interference and try to detect it. Try to get your mind around that
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kind of graphical visualization! So, you may say, the universe is
probabilistic, and your showing me a graph of probabilities, so
what? The “so what” is nothing less than everything that is. It
turns out that the abstract mathematics actually turn right around
in their tracks and start acting like “stuff ” again, and at this part of
the intellectual journey almost anyone who keeps waiting for a
final answer, like “this may look like a castle, but I can see it is made
up of little identical Lego blocks,” is given full permission to weep
and throw up her hands.
We have known the properties of waves of things we can
see in real life for a few centuries now. Like the ripples in the pond,
the waviness is visible to us, it moves and that is visible to us, we
can run along with it, measure its speed, and maybe even hold out a
ruler and estimate the distance between successive ripple crests. In
the case of water ripples, the thing that is waving is the relative
“up-ness or down-ness” of the surface of the water. And, we have
known, at least since the time of Newton, that things that exhibit
wave structure can be expected to do certain things: when more
than one is present in the same region they can interfere

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(constructively or destructively); they reflect from surfaces; and
they refract, which means that they change the speed at which they
propagate when they pass from one kind of medium (the stuff that
waves) to another. Since acoustical sound does all of these things,
we have been able to long infer that sound is a wave even though
we couldn’t see them and it took some explaining to say what was
waving and how.
So, in the case of matter waves we have a waving of a
statistical probability, which seems to be so abstract that any
analogy to the waving of a slinky doesn’t get there. Okay, so you
have just drawn a mathematical conception of a piece of paper, and
that picture of a conception is wavy. Yes, but the things (like
electrons) being abstractly described by drawing a picture of an
abstract concept, wind up doing REAL things that can only be
inferred, from our experience, as resulting from REAL waviness!
Matter waves interfere with one another, and when we freeze that
process by detecting it, low and behold, we get a real, visible
pattern of wave interference. And there are examples even weirder

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than that, such as the single electron shot through ONE slit of a
two slit grid, which comes out the other side with an interference
pattern, as though its very own statistical waviness interfered with
itself, and then manifest itself as a thing when we stopped the
experiment.
We don’t teach much about the quantum formulation of
physical reality, except to future physicists. We consider the
underlying mathematics to be far beyond anything that could be
expected of our students to be part of, say, a general education
program at a university, and there is some truth to that. It does
make its way into some general publications about science for the
educated lay reader, some of which are honest attempts to express
in words these mind-boggling concepts. These concepts fell out of
a collision between laboratory measurement and a riot of
conceptual thinking, where the results, as with relativity theory,
have held heady implications, indeed, of very deep mysteries that
have then predicted other ideas, unthinkable without these
constructs, that have turned into reality.

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I can only imagine the raw excitement among those early
quantum theorists, the sense that they were actually beginning to
part the veil on the ineffable. You may think that theoretical
physics is an area so intellectually abstract, and so buried in the
arcana of the scientific cathedrals, such as those who run
experiments at the handful of the world’s huge particle accelerator
laboratories, that it is one of those areas of human intellectual
endeavor that you will never experience first hand, in the same way
that you would be surprised to receive a personal invitation to
participate in the excavation of the earliest human remains. And in
either case, without the proper training, you would not likely be
able to appreciate what the trained expert would see at either site.
Furthermore, neither one would have much to do with the duties
and challenges of everyday life, and whatever was learned from
either elementary particle physics or an archeological dig, it
probably wouldn’t change the way we live our lives, individually,
communally, socially, politically, or culturally.

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In fact, you live with the consequences of quantum
mechanics continually. At the most obvious level, if this is really
how matter and energy behave, then of course your very physical
being is intimately connected with these insights—but, of course,
billions of people have lived out their lives without knowing these
things, so it is not so much an issue of practical necessity. However,
the very device I am composing my thoughts on right now is a
product of quantum mechanical theory applied to the material
world. The entire complex of electronics that has pervaded our
world like nothing so much as an organism is based upon an
understanding of the ghostly world of matter waves and wave-
particle duality. In point of fact, most scientists and engineers who
use this sophisticated equipment (and not just the rest of us who
may have a personal computer, or a television, or even a telephone)
don’t know the underlying principles that allow semiconductors to
work, and they aren’t required to for their work. But we use them
all the time and they are harnessing the most counterintuitive,
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In the world of quantum mechanics, for example, one can
perform an experiment in which an electron, with a known energy,
exists in a space from which it cannot escape (called a potential
well). Suppose, for example, that you were a groundskeeper at a
major league baseball stadium, and on an off day you and a friend
had the whole park to yourselves, so you decided to play a little
game of catch. You only had one baseball with you, and this was a
very special baseball. It doesn’t have to be Mark McGuire’s
seventieth home run ball, just a ball you have had for a long time
that had sentimental value. You enjoyed using it; you just didn’t
want to loose this ball, so you had written your name and address
on it, just in case you ever lost it—one of a kind.
So you and your friend are tossing the ball back and forth,
and enjoying the strange feeling of being the only two in this
enormous enclosure. Suddenly, on one of the tosses, the ball seems
to disappear. Your friend is running around trying to see where the
ball is. Maybe he lost it in the sunlight, but he doesn’t have it and
neither do you. So the two of you go around the infield looking for
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it. It just doesn’t make sense not being able to find it, but it is
nowhere to be found, and you didn’t even throw it that hard. It has
to be somewhere, but it isn’t. And there certainly isn’t even a
theoretical possibility that you threw it out of the park. You don’t
possess a throwing arm that could get the ball out of the park. You
would be just about as able to be able to throw a baseball out of the
Grand Canyon. Your friend is sorry, and you are too, at having lost
your favorite baseball, so the game is over. You go out to the
parking lot to drive home, and you find your baseball lying there
on the pavement. How could the ball have gotten here? No doubt,
you would rehearse all possible scenarios to try to make sense of
the ball in the parking lot, and in fact you would be desperate to
make sense of it because otherwise the world doesn’t make sense.
Could it have rolled out here? No, all the doors were shut. Could
someone have played a joke and placed it out here? But there
wasn’t anyone else inside. Maybe, even though we didn’t notice it,
there was some sort of a whirlwind that carried it out here.
Now suppose you are back in there playing catch, when
suddenly when you throw it, the ball just seems to disappear.
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Several weeks go by, and you get a package in the mail from
Australia, and it has your baseball inside, with a note. The note is
from someone you have never met, who explains that he was just
out on the beach, by himself, watching the stars, and suddenly a
baseball appeared in his lap. It had your address, so he sent it back.
He might add, “I don’t know how it got here. Nobody threw it to
me; I was alone. It didn’t wash up from the shore. It didn’t even
slowly materialize like those things you see on old Star Trek
shows. It was just there. I can’t explain what it was like because it
wasn’t like anything I have words for. If you have time, write back
and tell me whatever you can because I am afraid I might be losing
my mind.” He also gives you the date and time when this
manifestation occurred, and it corresponds exactly to when your
ball disappeared.
In the realm of the quantum mechanical world, every one
of these outcomes is possible, and they actually HAPPEN, and if
they didn’t happen with some statistical REGULARITY, your
computer wouldn’t work. Max Born, one of the original

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contributors to the quantum hypothesis once said that anyone who
thinks they understand quantum mechanics doesn’t. And what he
meant, I think, was that this realm of understanding is not
amenable to any comparisons with ordinary life experience at the
scale we live it. Going back to the Enlightenment natural
philosophers, it was part of the worldview to think that everything
might just be matter in motion, that is, the clockwork universe. For
many systems such thinking works reasonably well. You actually
can imagine the air in a balloon as trillions of little BBs all
bouncing around in random motion, resulting in the large-scale
effect of air pressure. But there is no analogue of mundane objects,
like billiard balls, which will give you any handle on the ghostly
manifestations of the quantum world.
Now here is the thing that is even more amazing than all
that. For some reason, after millennia of pondering and telling
stories and building things, we, human beings, were let in on this
secret! No one invented the principles of the strange world of the
quanta, of which we are all composed (along with everything else).
No one sat down and said, "I want to build up a physical universe
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that will operate on these really bizarre principles because it would
just be so cool." It just is, and the nature of what is lies far beyond
the realm of anything we were able to invent as we played with
ideas of mystical powers. How could we ever become dulled to the
magic, the wonderful strangeness of insights that keep enticing us
to further explorations, and even transforming our very daily lives
in the process?
Yet now we sit here with our remote controls and computer
keyboards, like so many Greek deities who know they can play
around in human affairs or split mountains but are becoming a
little bored and restless with your everyday miracles of creation
and destruction, and perhaps yawning a bit as we ask for someone
to surprise us again. Bring me the next miracle; this stuff here
surely can’t be miraculous because it is in front of me, show me
something new! Rather than seeing the underlying mysteries of
the natural world and what we have been able to create, we get
overcrowded with consumer stuff, which blocks out by its
surrogacy and ubiquity both the natural wonders all around us, as
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well as the awe-inspiring processes that make possible what we do
create. We are trained, by and large, to be consumers of nature’s
end-effects, custom-packaged, where the only magicians whose
inventions interest us are the marketing experts.
I don’t mean to give the impression that professional
scientists, or even the leading lights in every case, are more
enlightened in the most fundamental sense, and less prone than we,
the consumers and bystanders, are always more dull to nature’s
mysteries and majesties. Not at all. It is a human propensity, and
one we should guard against just as much as we should guard
against our inclinations to be greedy or hateful or shortsighted in
any way. In 1896, America’s most prominent physicist, Albert
Michelson, who was our first Nobel laureate in physics and was at
the time the chair of the physics department at the University of
Chicago, actually had entered into the school’s course catalogue a
brief description of what he thought physics and the training of
young physicists was about. He said that it was most likely that the
basic laws governing the physical universe were already in hand
and understood, and that primarily, the work of physicists of the

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next generation would be in refining that framework. Or, as he put
it, working out to precision the physical constants “to the sixth
decimal place.”
Instead, that next generation of physicists would witness
and participate in a revolution of insights unlike the world had
ever seen, including quantum mechanics, relativity, and the mind-
boggling intimation that the entire cosmos was expanding. And
this pronouncement was made by a man whose most seminal
experiment actually formed the foundation from which Einstein
envisioned his special theory of relativity! Here was someone right
in the thick of it, and right at that intellectual cusp his vision
proceeded no further than to produce an army of worker ants who
would polish the intellectual artifacts of his generation!
In fact, the mysteries just keep coming and teasing us with
glimpses of mysteries within mysteries. When I was an
undergraduate we learned that the old model of the atom, viewing
it as a solar system in miniature, was, of course, wrong. It doesn’t
quite fit Wolfgang Pauli’s criterion for being “not even wrong,” but
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it was just another example of how we naturally search for mental
pictures we can understand, and, after all, it didn’t survive very
long. All this is true. Yet it isn’t merely a mistake, or a fossil of an
idea that, in Darwinian fashion, was terribly misfit for its
environment and quickly passed away. It has a lovely Platonic
attraction to it, seeing patterns within patterns, and proceeding on
the faith that there is some congruence between what we, as mortal
humans, can imagine, and the nature of the universe in which we
find ourselves. It can also be seen as wonderfully holographic, and
being able to “see the universe in a grain of sand,” as the poet
William Blake so eloquently put it. It turns out that, so far as we
know, if the universe is actually holographic, we are still too far
embedded in it to know what patterns to look for.
Furthermore, the revelations from astronomy and
cosmology just keep pouring in, and rather than closing off the
universe to some neat package, we continue to be surprised at what
we don’t know. We are only able to begin to see what we don’t
know with each new set of questions that are only asked as the
picture expands. Among our latest conceptual challenges in

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visualizing the truly immense, the physical cosmos as far as we are
now privileged to view it, include the following: according to our
best measurements of the movements of galaxies and clusters of
galaxies, there seems to be a deficit in what we can detect. That is,
things seem to have motions that indicate that there is a lot of
stuff, gravity-producing stuff, that we can’t see within the realms of
what we can see. This “dark matter,” as it is referred to is not a
little tidying up and adding to the sixth decimal place. It is more on
the order of at least ninety percent. The implication is that, just
from what we can see, there is roughly ten times more stuff (in the
same region) that is invisible!
Also, when speaking of really big structure, it has only
become apparent in the last few years that the really huge super
complexes of galaxies may be arranged not at all as we expected,
as a uniform scattering of astronomical entities, but more as sheets
or bubbles, where the galaxy complexes form the boundaries of
those bubbles and the insides are relatively empty! Why? At this
latest level of observation, the entire cosmos seems to be implying

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nothing like Thomson’s “plum pudding” model of the atom, but
more like foam. Again, I wonder not only why this structure
appears, but also why we as a species should have the privilege of
understanding any of this. I see this very privilege as yet another
intimation of transcendence, of our gift to rise out of flatland. And
these intimations are the products, very often, of our noodling
around, exploring, and being driven to push the boundaries of our
perceptions from within flatland itself.
So we go to a lab in Scotland and find that, low and behold,
someone has cloned a sheep. Then we interview the researcher and
he says, well, yes, this is a major step, but it really resulted from a
lot of painstaking trials, and let’s see what comes of it. It really
was, after all, the result of the application of exquisite technique,
which required lots of other insights and techniques, which haven’t
been available until now. Meanwhile, we convene more panels of
experts, some of whom tell us that this has great practical
implications for genetic research and the possible cure of
intractable diseases, and some of whom tell us that these
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slap controls on it. Some people warn of a Brave New World
scenario, where we’re breeding human organ factories or mindless
robots, and surely this sort of research is not where we should be
meddling. We draw the boundary at life itself. And some people
just get depressed, concluding that these techniques mean that,
once again, science has taken mystery from the world and we really
are just a bunch of fancy matter-in-motion conglomerations.
But just as Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and some others
didn’t create the world of quantum bizarreness, neither did we
create life. What continues to amaze me is why we, as a species,
should have the privilege to even peer into the next level of the
hologram, whether that is cell division, the quantum, or the
cosmos. I don’t find any of this depressing. As I said before, the
mysteries keep coming, and to me the greatest and most inspiring
mystery is the consideration of why we should be able to make
these leaps of vision. And in contemplation of this human
privilege, the vision that keeps calling to me says that there is both
heritage and destiny at work. We are both immersed in and

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intimately interwoven into the very things we seek to understand,
and we are called to feel our way towards that expression of the
grandeur of creation in miniature. It is time for us to see the
human experience, and our individual lives within that, as
expressions of these mysteries, which may have no end of
embeddedness.
There are plenty of people, including ones I know, who
would howl at my persistence in asking why we should be able to
understand anything. “It’s simple,” some of them would say (and I
have a reflex that causes me to squint and take on the facial
expression of a migraine when ever someone says those two words
in response to a grand mystery). You have committed the fatal
error of logic, which we have all learned so well at least since the
Enlightenment. Your question of “why” requires teleology:
purpose, intent, meaning. There isn’t any. A pattern is just a
pattern.
As for things like language, abstract reasoning, aesthetics,
and all the other stuff, they are just artifacts of our evolution,
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which, for survival reasons only, favored social structure, which
required language. And (if I only had a brain!) I would realize that
in the cosmic scale of things, the reason “why” life evolved on this
planet is a question without an answer, and asking it reveals a
pitifully anthropocentric need for meaning on my part. The cosmos
has had untold trillions of worlds to try with. This one just
happened to succeed, and we are here as a result, and it is only
because of that impossibly large number of trials versus the
paucity of successes that romantics like you can even hang around
to think it is amazing that we can ask why! As to why the physical
properties arose just so finely tuned to allow this particular cosmos
to exist at all, that’s just another probability. For all we know, an
infinite number of tries at something like a big bang occurred
before one of them got it right, and that’s why the universe is here,
just the old tyranny of numbers game, and that’s “why” you are
here, if you must ask.
Ah, I get it. Thank you. I’m glad that there are at least a few
folks who can set me straight, and I am properly embarrassed. We

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do have the right model in hand now, and it really is just
mechanism and probability. So, I guess all there is left for us to do
now, before we turn off the light, is set about figuring out that
sixth decimal place for all the parts of this fine, desiccated
explanation. Oh, and don’t forget to collect your Nobel Prize on
the way out. It’s a special edition, you know, the very last we will
be awarding.
I am an unrepentant cheerleader for the pursuit of
knowledge of any kind and in any field, and I find the revelations
of all the experimental and theoretical sciences astonishing,
expansive, and thrilling. I am not, however, equally thrilled with
what a few scientists, actually in the stream of this unfolding
journey, feel we are constrained to conclude from these visions.
iv) Why should we seek wisdom?
Is the holographic model a real representation of the
physical universe, and perhaps by implication, the mental universe
of consciousness as well? Of course, I don’t know. Even if it winds

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up having some sort of persistence in our conceptual models, I
don’t think it would wind up being anything so literal as an
extrapolation of the literal description we considered above of a
holographic film exposure, and perhaps not even an extrapolation
of the biological version, which is dynamic at multiple levels, and
not static like the exposure pattern on the film.
Sure, the organization of our very local neighborhood, the
solar system, is not like the bizarre mental picture we ascertain for
the atom. Okay, so one of our Platonic intimations turned out, at
least for the time being, to be a dead-end. And it may very well
turn out that the patterns of holography we’ve been considering
here are not universal. But the utility of considering holographic
structures of mind and matter at the present may be that it hints at
another imaginative leap that is, at present, beyond the
dimensionality of our consciousness, despite our yearning efforts
to get out of flatland altogether. Perhaps the holographic map is
something like the elders of flatland getting together and
witnessing the image of Sphere (instead of A. Square being the

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only witness), as it passes through our domain. But at least we are
looking, and trying to understand the apparition.
What I continue to find exciting and sublime to
contemplate is that we, humanity, should be able to comprehend
any patterns at all. Why should there be any congruence between
our thinking and the realm of things that have nothing to do with
our simple physical survival? There is no Darwinian imperative for
being able to find the intellectual resonances (and whatever other
ingredients that enter into creative leaps of imagination in any
field) that expand our consciousness into realms over which we
need not have any input to survive, whether at the level of the
electron or the entire cosmos. Why are we privileged to see
mystery when it doesn’t put food on the table or allow us to escape
predators?
These thoughts provoke in me a strong sense, first of all,
that there is indeed meaning and purpose in the human experience.
Secondly, is the impression that we, individually and collectively,
seen locally and globally, comprehended at a frozen snapshot in

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time or embraced as unfolding stories through time and
generations, are, in fact, on our way somewhere. We are only given
glimpses of the next level of the holograph one at a time, and even
those glimpses require an active will of gratitude and envisioning.
Without gratitude and envisioning we continually run the risk of
conflating our various piecemeal views and descriptions, with
creation itself.
Rather than reveling in the wonder of it all, of the fact that
we exist, that we can imagine and envision, and that we are able to
construct marvelous narratives of meaning which begs us to
realize that we are part of the very fabric of that meaning, we can
instead dismiss the wonder of existence by misunderstanding the
spiritual significance of our own explanations. Instead of
embracing the wonder of all that is, including the untold questions
we can’t even formulate, which awareness naturally generates
profound gratitude, we often stuff everything we think we can
explain into an expanding archival box that we label “not so special
stuff,” simply because we have explained it at some level. The

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conflation of human explanation with a semblance of deadness is
not just toxic to the imagination (especially for the younger
generations) but it is a deliberate denial of the grand spiritual gift
of being human.
However, it makes all the difference whether or not we
choose to seek visions, or to see the human experience as just so
much complication of crossed purposes and parochial interests,
with each interest birthed and competing for its own survival in an
ecology of being that is without any purpose beyond its immediate
experienced context. And what I would like to urge at this point is
that, it is not just physical manifestations of the world (taken at
any level) that seem to imply some sort of holographic
embeddedness, but that knowledge, ideas, creative jumps, and
wisdom also imply something of a holographic nature. Again, I
must take care to warn against the strict literalism of this analogy,
for even if it is true and not just an intellectual conceit, like the
planetary model of the atom, it would seem to have a depth to it
that we must intentionally evolve toward to appreciate. Such
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is not the sort of evolution of mutations in morphology we
associate with the Darwinian explanation for the rise and fall of
species.
I mean to infer an evolution of consciousness, a word that I
know is fraught with confusion in academic contexts. However,
there are only so many words in my vocabulary to turn to in such
conversational patterns, where the printed text might be held at a
distance and judged, rather than trying to co-vision and
comprehend along with the reader. I might instead invoke, as I
have done earlier, the word spirituality to describe these larger
expressions of what we are about, as we become creatures of
wisdom, and not just knowledge or information. On the other
hand, I might be tempted to say, with Max Born, that anyone who
thinks he or she understands it (in the way of a simple physical
model) doesn’t. In truth, though, I do not think that observation
applies here. I am speaking of an awareness of a sense of motion
within patterns of human experience, and of the process of
becoming, as a species, (instead of static descriptions of what we

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seem to be doing that is observable at a moment in time). I think
that these visions can be awakened in each other because I think it
gets to the core of who we actually are, even if that nature is often
obscured from our view by the press of daily events and the
contents of the nightly news. And the key word here is
“awakened,” which is one of the most recurrent themes in every
one of the world’s spiritual paths, or wisdom traditions.
We are also, I believe, at an important phase of (potentially)
positive creative discontinuity in the evolution of our
consciousness. The best analogy that comes to mind, and I stress
that it is only an analogy with all of the limitations that analogies
suffer when pressed into service beyond those limitations, is
something like the biological process of differentiation that occurs
in the development of mulitcellular organisms like the human
body. There comes a time when, somehow, it is communicated to
the next generation of cells, all originally identical and only
coming into being from the death of the mother cell, that it is time
to become something else. The daughter cells are impressed with
the imperative that, although they will carry all the heritage of
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their mother, it is their destiny to start becoming new creatures in
the unfolding of a pattern of exquisite grandeur not yet manifest.
Once the fully realized creature appears, all the cells, not very
different from each other, still carry the wisdom of the original
fertilized egg, and all the differentiated cells making up the various
organs remain conversant with each other, but their conversation is
on a much different level, exchanging all sorts of perceptions of
this grand manifestation, the human being, and their (cells)
activities are in service of the myriad things that fully realized
humans do.
Of course this analogy is describing the physicality and
functioning of the body only. I believe that we are much more than
that, but my visions only persuade me this much and not the
particulars of what the next stage of the developing wisdom-
organism, speaking of humanity individually and collectively,
actually will be, let alone subsequent stages. We can only
incrementally perceive that differentiation and synthesis are
occurring, but that insight alone is spectacular and, so far as we

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know, makes us fundamentally different organisms. We can not
only make inferences and projections into the future, but, through
awareness of that process as our purpose in mortality, we can
consciously take part in creating our own spiritual evolution.
I think it is this very perception that might provide our
rising generations, today and in the future, with the visions they
need to be actively and creatively engaged in their own lives. We
need to be able to inspire and then let go of our younger
generations. They have great purpose and destinies, which will
manifest themselves in their lives differently from our own lives, as
the mother cells giving birth to differentiating daughters, and the
process goes on and on, not merely mechanistically, but with the
spiritual calling of our own dreams and visions at that stage, to
actively participate in and modulate what is, to envision even more
wondrous possibilities not visible to earlier generations. These
later generations will still bear the imprint of the wisdoms and life
stories of their ancestors, but their mission is not to simply hold
the current world together in some rearguard, defensive, vigilance.

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Certainly, we must also see to those things, much as the
body must constantly re-evaluate its current insults and send out
its specially designated members to address that. In this light it is
right and necessary that we apply some of our creative energy
toward repairing things we detect are askew or injured, whether
that be our environment, our systems of justice and human rights,
and other parts of the human-world complex that are suffering.
Were we not to see to these things, the body of humanity might
become mortally ill. However, to imply that simply stopping the
problems that continually arise is the only visionary purpose to life
is akin to saying that the only things humans are good at, and what
they should be completely about, is the distribution of nutrients
throughout the body and the killing of harmful germs when they
appear. A body in a comatose state can do these things without help
from the conscious mind.
I do not object to admitting to our younger generation that
we have severe difficulties that will require imagination and
compassion, and that some of them may find their profound calling
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in being primarily about solving particulars among these problem
sets. What I adamantly feel is wrong is handing over the world to
the rising generation with the imparted wisdom that running
around putting out fires is the only visionary thing to be done. “We
screwed up the world, sorry about that. We have left you with
nuclear weapons, environmental crises, ethnic hatreds and a politics
of confrontation, and we have addicted you to the pursuit of
surrogates. Really, we are sorry. So it is your job to fix all those
things, and from our statistical projections you have but a slim
window of opportunity. Anyway, for what it’s worth, good luck.”
It is not that these problems do exist that is so toxic to our
next generations. It is the preaching to those generations, that this
is the whole picture, putting out these fires is the very most
important visions you could possibly have about the meaning of
life, and these are the pronouncements of people who often
consider themselves to be the vehicles of the best far-reaching
wisdom. Furthermore, we are preaching this morbid vision of the
best possible things we could be about to those who have to go
through all the stages of individual human development, from

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infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood. They indeed look
to their elders for hope, vision, and the transcendent. We may not
be able to particularize the visions of them becoming different
creatures as a wonderful gift of mortality, but if our only
responses range from “I guess we’ll never know, now get to work;”
to “get a good education so you can get a good job;” to “we are on
the verge of extinction and that terror should push you to
frantically run around and stop the madness” we are not giving
them much to go on. And it is these very children who do not yet
have the personal maturity or intellectual structures to challenge
us on these pronouncements. This is what is truly spiritually
debilitating, and we need to stop promoting that impossibly
pinched spectrum as defining the only possibilities for what their
lives are about, or, on the other hand, giving them only end-time
religious dogma that, rather than being an invitation to the
generous blessing of co-creation of as yet unimagined futures, has
its own sort of fatalism about the meaning of life.

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There is yet another quality of the envisioning mind, and
that is expansiveness that has the power to wonderfully evaporate
many of the seemingly intractable problems we face as individual
and societies when we operate only within the artificial perspective
of flatland. So much squabbling, and the truly horrific
consequences of such squabbling, necessarily reveals their own
false conceptions, pettinesses, banalities, contradictions and
ugliness, when our imaginations are caught up with visions beyond
flatland. And again, I am not urging some singular “answer,” as
though an envisioning society would all subscribe to the same
religion. That, too, diminishes the glory that we are not just
observers of reality, and we are more than even participants. To
draw a tepid analogy from quantum mechanics, we cannot even
just observe without becoming part of the experiment. We actively
co-create the realities that distill into the next level of visions. And
to whatever extent the patterns in the evolution of consciousness
may bear some resemblance to holography, we are all privileged to
observe and comprehend these grand structures at every stage. But
we also have as many privileged visions of those emerging

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structures as there are individual human beings. Our visions of
possibilities become immeasurably multiplied by our conversations,
through our sharing of our visions.
And so, before reconsidering what sorts of education might
be most appropriate for wisdom and envisioning, we might briefly
reconsider that knowledge is not just an accumulation of
information. Rather, knowledge arises from the apprehension of
useful patterns among appropriate information, but such
knowledge is still at the level of being value-neutral. Knowledge
and technique can be used for good or ill, or for mere diversion
with no consequences at all. The self-same scientific insights can be
applied to add either wonders or weapons to the world. An
understanding of the psyche can be used to heal or manipulate. A
knowledge of history can be used by one teacher to illuminate and
by another to intimidate his students. Further, the mere presence of
a pattern may or may not provide knowledge and a key to
understanding. The Dewey-decimal system is most definitely a
pattern, but it is just one possible way of arranging books. I am

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not convinced that by deep contemplation of the Dewey-decimal
system one would arrive at anything more compelling, even about
Mr. Dewey himself.
If we can agree that information alone does not constitute
knowledge (either positive, negative, or neutral), and that
knowledge is a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for wisdom,
we may at least infer that there are more fruitful ways of knowing
and learning than occur through teaching our rising generations
ever increasing amounts of facts and techniques, with the blind
hope that, in Darwinian fashion, if there are important themes that
can give rise to wisdom they will simply pop out because they
produce intellectual offspring.
v.) What ARE we doing? The evolution of the university, and the
atrophy of synthesis
If we look at the historical development of the western
canon, for example, there are many periods whose overarching
conceptions were based upon a faith that knowledge systems are,

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ultimately, interrelated and indicative of some perception of the
transcendent. Certainly that was the central insight of Plato’s
philosophy, which saw human reason as a privileged resonance
with ultimate truths in every area of conscious contemplation and
their worldly applications. In this system of knowing, the study of
mathematics and music are of peculiar importance, not because
such study allows one to become socially “cultured,” or because one
will perfect a utilitarian technique. Instead, these represented
spiritual practices in realms where we are in closest communion
with transcendent insight.
Such study of particular fields deemed to be of a kind with
insight beyond the mere detail of the earthly and mundane
remained the focus of education well past the Middle Ages and the
establishment of the first formal universities. The Renaissance
Naturalists held to these beliefs as well, and were working within a
broad Platonic-Aristotelian world-view in their arcane pursuit of
the “philosopher’s stone,” and their alchemical recipes, where the
integrity of the experimenter was inextricably fused with the

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material experiments he was performing. The entire physical world
was alive with sympathies and antipathies according to the
Naturalists, so it was obvious to them that the physical world
would respond not just to the techniques of the alchemist, but to
his intent as well. To see the philosophers who ushered in
rationalism, objectivity, and the Scientific Revolution as a group of
immediately distinct intellects from their Naturalist predecessors
and contemporaries, is to retrofit history with a prejudice toward
the results of several centuries of Enlightenment thinking that
were not nearly so distinct at the time.
One of the leading lights of the Scientific Revolution,
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who is credited with independently
conceiving of the calculus at the same time as Newton, considered
intelligence to be a property of the entire universe. He imagined
this intelligence in a nearly physical but still mystical way, positing
in 1714 that the cosmos was permeated with monads, or particles
of intelligence that were microscopic expressions of universal
intelligence. Or, to use the wonderful economy of explanation of
writer George Dyson, “[t]hese entelechies (the local actualization

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of a universal mind) reflect in their own inner state the state of the
universe as a whole. According to Leibniz, relation gave rise to
substance, not, as Newton had it, the other way around.”
Nonetheless, by the time Leibniz was considering a
universal mind, the rise of specialties in intellectual investigation
and the multiplication of information that resulted were already
underway. By the time the French philosopher Denis Diderot,
along with mathematician Jean d’Alembert managed to publish
their magnificent Encyclopedia project in 1765, they relied on
other acknowledged masters of fields of knowledge to help
organize, on one bookshelf, all the knowledge that was. Still,
Diderot and d’Alembert included an intricate taxonomy of
knowledge, trying to weave so much learning together in linkages
of derivation and genealogy rather than leave them as so much
separate observations in art, literature, botany, or physiology.
Within a century of the publication of Diderot’s encyclopedia,
however, the German university had evolved into something quite
different from either the center of spiritual inquiry, or even the

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inculcation of “kulture,” as the Germans had considered their
peculiar national mission.
It was on German soil where the first research universities
were established, considering that term very much in the way we
think of it today, and the United States was soon to follow the
German model. The first and most notable example was at Johns
Hopkins University, founded in 1876 directly on the German
research university model. That model, however, was soon
emulated at the rest of America’s premier institutions, including
Harvard, Princeton and soon included the new land-grant
universities springing up such as Cornell and Wisconsin. This
model was not simply a matter of cultural envy and aping. It paid
off handsomely, both in deepening knowledge specialties and in
producing commercial spin offs. The most notable early example
was the specialized research in organic chemistry in Germany,
which produced a world-dominating industry for that country in
the nineteenth century.

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The rise of academic specialties paralleled the rise of
professions, and we have already discussed the social landscape that
resulted in this country in this century. The academic landscape,
not surprisingly, produced a lot of specialists who, as their
disciplines continued to amass data and produce sub-specialty
offspring, found it increasingly difficult to talk to one another. It
was not so much a product of animosity of one discipline toward
another (although that exists as well); rather, it was that
disciplinary and subdisciplinary specialists were paid, rewarded,
and promoted for tunneling deeper, not for engaging in great
conversations with faculty in other fields. In short, there were too
many incentives to further bifurcate the accumulation of facts like
so many arteries becoming millions of capillaries, rather than
synthesizing.
In the natural sciences, of every kind, academic specialties
had immediate payoff in the commercial world as well. The social
sciences came into being as academic specialties after the research
model of the natural sciences had been established as was

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producing such stunning results, and it is very difficult to look at
the history of the academic social sciences and not see them being
driven to pattern themselves after the natural sciences, and thereby
obtain the same respect and support. The specialization within the
humanities followed the lead of the social sciences, reluctantly but
inevitably, insofar as they were housed on campuses where research
specialization was everything, and if they did not also model
themselves in this fashion, there was danger that they would be
suspect as fit members of an academic community at all.
Yet, for all this specialization, the outstanding thinkers were
always prone to be inspired by larger possibilities, by patterns that
suggest themselves to the mind by synthesis and not dissection. In
the process of doing this, they were often misunderstood and even
ridiculed by their professional peers. We are not just referring to a
paranoid perception of the lone outsider, which seems to have
particular attraction for conspiracy theories. Rather, it is a very
natural human response toward truly original thought, and it is
very naturally amplified by the development of specialties of
expertise.
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At this point I would like to pose what might seem to be an
obvious question to some, with an obvious answer. However, I pose
it not for the easy answers to which we are prone, but as an
opening to a very different insight of possibilities. The question is
this: where were the women (half the population of any society)
and the wide variety of ethnicities and cultures during most of the
history of the institutionalized university? The answer to the
superficial question is, of course, that they were largely excluded.
The more interesting question is why, and the really interesting
question I would say is “the history of why” because it is not a
static answer but has its own evolution. And if it is all right with
the reader, I am going to go right past some of the first-order
explanations, such as the power of patriarchy or that white males
are prone to be racist evildoers, which again only works at the level
of description, not cause. Still, if one even pursues even that line of
analysis with patience, it does move our understanding of “why,”
further to the level of something like “fear of the other,” and its
attendant corollary, which is the consolidation of power and

536
privilege. Fear of the other, I think, is beginning to penetrate to
the realm of actual cause to the extent it taps into elements of the
human psyche, individually and culturally, but I would like to
follow a somewhat different direction of examination.
Since the establishment, in the middle ages, of the first
formal universities in the western context, these institutions were
not only a preserve for the privileged, but they had a social
structure very much like fiefdoms. This was perfectly consonant
with the outside social structures in which they were given shape,
and one is hard-pressed to find anything like an embrace of
diversity of any kind in that larger cultural context. The concept
of the university being, beyond an inculcation of a wisdom canon,
a prerequisite for entry into professional opportunities is quite
modern. For most of their seven-century history the only
professions that a university was expected to serve (beyond its
calling for what we may loosely call general education) were
medicine, the law, and theology (producing clerics).

537
Let us move abruptly from the Middle Ages up to a mere
hundred years or so ago, and the emergence and wide proliferation
of the research university and the finer subdivision of specialties
within disciplines. And what we find is that, remarkably, many of
the original characteristics of the original universities are still
present. But these original structures and statements of purpose
and governance are uneasily mapped onto a new agenda of what
professors and their students thought they were about. Perhaps
even the words “mapped onto” are insufficient, because these words
imply at least the ability to locate a natural convergence. A better
analogy might be that these assumptions were glued onto a new
operational agenda, producing a very odd and unnatural beast.
The old assumptions, then, were roughly based upon a
canon of wisdom. Before the arrival of modern specialized
disciplines the university was the place where the universal (and
hence the term university) wisdom contained in the sacred texts
were to be passed down, with commentary. These wisdoms were
considered eternal and beyond social context, even though, as

538
viewed from the present, we know that it is impossible for learning
to be free of its cultural contexts. In Germany, before the advent of
the research-based institution, the universities became the focus for
passing down values and interpretations that placed the Germanic
culture at the zenith of enlightenment. The importance of this
assumption of a timeless canon was that it also comported with the
organization of the university, which placed it beyond criticism of
bodies beyond the gates, except by the church, in disseminating and
organizing this wisdom.
Rapid communication and critique through peer review, or
larger social pressures for relevance to commercial productivity
were not part of this knowledge universe. The “ivory tower”
preserve was not an inaccurate description of the original
university model. Like the cathedral building that also occurred
during this period, where the result was not intended to serve a
utilitarian function but as a representation of connection with the
heavenly realm, this is what cultures wanted their universities to
be. Previously I compared the university with a fiefdom, which
implies a sort of sovereignty to the professoriate, who ultimately

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had only to answer to the regional prelates or the Pope himself.
However, another system was already in place during the
organization of the early university, and this was the guild system
for the applied arts and crafts, in which those formally considered
masters could hold absolute power of entry into their craft, and
this model must be also incorporated to understand the peculiarity
rights and functions that the university held as its own.
With the advent of the research university what is most
remarkable is that very little of the functional assumptions
changed, even to this day. Yet it was obvious to everyone, and
especially the research faculty themselves, that what they were
doing bore no resemblance to what the universities between the
thirteenth and eighteenth centuries were about. The results have
no coherence, but lots of power, and they do all sorts of things,
operationally, that are incongruous, at crossed purposes, and done
by default. Our most prestigious institutions, taken by measure of
their budgets, publications, number of Nobel laureates on their
staffs, or their admissions policies continue to churn out all sorts of

540
information and yet no one can come close to producing a mission
statement that anyone on the faculty would recognize as “their job,”
except the most fluffy generalizations that would get shot down in
any freshman writing course as not even worthy of a sentimental
greeting card message.
You find things like “preparing our students for the
challenges of the twenty-first century,” “providing the skills
necessary for the leaders of tomorrow,” “gearing our rising
generation to not just survive, but thrive in the Information Age,”
or “our prestigious institution is a recognized world leader in
producing cutting-edge research in every area of the sciences and
humanities.” I have no idea what any of these things means. I can’t
even concatenate them or permute them, like so much refrigerator
magnet poetry, and cobble together anything that has meaning, or
put them into a blender and hope that meaning will just emerge.
Meaning will not emerge: there isn’t any meaning in the
constituent parts. No holographic pattern will emerge when
illuminated with coherent light, because the fuzzy smear on the
film REALLY IS just a fuzzy smear with no embedded pattern.

541
And without any emergent meaning upon which to stand, even
momentarily, there is no way to use that vantage point (since there
isn’t one) from which one might produce visions of further
meaning and wisdoms.
What is the purpose of a university education in
contemporary society, and why do institutions continue to put out
such meaningless blandishments as supposed mission statements?
The answers to both questions are tightly linked, and depressing. A
university education has become the equivalent of a union card,
and the blather over what the institution is about, as if it were
about any purpose, is no more than advertising-speak to the
“customers” (students and parents), assuring them that they will
get what they are really after. They, the customers, are buying
something very like an automobile, not one that they assembled or
need to understand, but one they can just get in and drive. In
purchasing a name brand (of either an education or a car) we also
purchase the right to announce to everyone else who believes in the

542
same surrogate language that we have purchased a lifestyle, even a
state of grace.
If a significant number of people no longer believe in the
truth of any system of linked surrogates, the system falls apart
and loses a value, like so many Russian rubles. Keeping the value of
this system of surrogates propped up lies not in its common utility.
Instead, it requires that there always be a “leading edge” which is
rare, like precious metals, and its very rarity allows it to be traded
as something of inherent worth. Gold, by any utilitarian analysis,
is not particularly useful. Silver is infinitely more useful, for
example in photographic film, but the comparative value of gold to
silver is determined solely by their relative proportions in the
earth’s crust. You can’t drive away a gold ingot, or eat it, or ponder
it for insight, or have it tell you wonderful stories. Even as
elements go, it is fairly boring stuff, more known for its inertness
(it doesn’t tarnish) than anything it can do or reveal.
Since we have all collectively agreed to assign it worth just
because there isn’t much of it, you can use that gold ingot to buy
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lots of cars, lots of expensive food, and maybe even get yourself a
live-in storyteller for a few years. But the gold itself can’t do any of
the things that it can buy. There is nothing in the bar of metal that
you could ever pull out, holographically, and ascertain, for example,
the crafts used to build a house (which it may have bought), or the
vision that inspired a great painting (which it may have bought). It
just sits there, and we revere it.
To the extent, then, that we might hold up the institutions
we presently call universities as generators and disseminators of
wisdom, and that those who attend them will leave with anything
like wisdom, we are simply applying a romantic and meaningless
descriptor that bears, in nearly every case, no relation to what a
university, or system of universities, does, and even less so to the
experience of someone passing through it. The very term,
“wisdom,” in fact, seems to be too heavy a burden to bear, even for
institutions with billion-dollar endowments, so they don’t use it.
What was once the very reason for establishing a university
is now a quality we fear to mention, and so we ratchet down our

544
expectations for universities, to be purveyors of knowledge,
perhaps, but at very least producers of information. However, we
continue to insist that we expect our university graduates to
emerge with some glancing acquaintance of a vast array of
disciplines, as well as some specialty information and techniques in
a particular discipline. We do this (again, there are a few
exceptions) by providing a matrix of courses and alternate options
that represent the big block areas (mathematics, the natural
sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities) that roughly
resemble the next level of organization down from the entire
university, which are the various schools.
And of course we don’t want our students to sample these
areas of knowledge by some fuzzyheaded generalist who doesn’t
really know anything cutting-edge, first hand. So, in some cases, we
have them taught by graduate students who themselves are already
fully differentiated into specialties to give the grad students some
teaching experience and to help dilute the cost of staffing the
research university with specialists at the full professor level. Some
prestigious universities have begun to hear back from their

545
customers that these methods are disingenuous from their point of
view of the sales contract. They want their Mary and Johnny to be
in touch with these famous people directly. After all, how would
you feel if you had paid to see Elvis himself, and instead got to see
a bunch of Elvis-impersonators? It doesn’t even matter if the
impersonator perhaps was a better singer than Elvis; you want to
touch celebrity, which is valuable simply because it is rare, not
because it is better, and that is what gives you bragging rights to
your friends. And therefore we see, at more and more expensive
universities, the full professors are being asked to go down into the
pit and teach, perhaps, one general education area course a year,
beyond their research and the graduate research seminars.
The results should not surprise us. We are asking our
youngsters to get something like a broad education, by sitting in a
large lecture hall listening to some noted specialist droning on who
thinks, all the while, that his very presence here is wasted and a
sure signal of the decline of civilization, and who is just doing his
or her job. Who knows, maybe something will rub off on some of
546
them just by association. Meanwhile, that professor lecturing on
principles of first year chemistry or the plays of Aeschylus, is not
expected to know anything about any one of the other general
education classes those very students are also taking. After all, they
only have a name in their fields (and are therefore celebrities we
want our children to see and hear) because they have been
rewarded for tunneling, not for aerial views. The lecturer on
Renaissance art probably doesn’t give a fig about neurophysiology
and vice versa, and isn’t expected to care, except on his or her own
private time as some sort of eccentric hobby. To the extent that
these fields may inform each other in some fascinating possibilities
of meta-languages or intimations of cross-disciplinary knowledge,
let alone any visions of wisdoms, we expect our eighteen year olds
to do this for themselves.
Of course this expectation is ridiculous, when at the same
time they are being presented with celebrity mentors who haven’t
done that, don’t pursue it, and for the most part consider such
pursuits to be folly. In fact we in academia have even developed a
perfectly bulletproof defense for the folly of producing wisdom

547
through real questions that matter being eagerly engaged by
disparate research specialists. This defense has the wonder of both
celebrating a revulsion toward ecumenicalism (and the emergence
of possible new wisdoms) and allowing us to plant our feet on the
“firm ground” of our subdisciplines whose very firmness is reified
by the existence of journals and associations of subdisciplines. The
defense takes on different names depending on the subspecialty
invoking it. Sometimes it is called “postmodernism,” sometimes
“post-structuralism,” and sometimes “deconstructionism,” but
whatever the label we are to believe that the pursuit of wisdom is
anachronistic because it implies meaning and purpose and
valuation, and that sounds too much like religion. It also allows a
bunch of people who might utterly disdain each other’s particular
assumptions to exist on the same acreage, separated by campus
regions, buildings, mailing lists, and, best of all, by their
disciplines.
Once again, I must take care not to be misunderstood, and
in doing so what I wish to say might be seen to be in direct

548
contradiction to what has come before. I think that the research
made possible by the establishment and maturation of disciplines is
wonderful and extraordinarily valuable. To discard the value of
disciplinary investigation is to simply reject history wholesale.
This development of disciplinary research has been a marvelous
step in the evolution of human understanding, and I certainly
don’t see us simply walking away from the study of disciplines any
time soon, and I think it would be a mistake if we did. From an
historical standpoint it is also quite natural that the depth of
insight pursued by making these disciplines should have started at
universities originally conceived under a very different worldview.
What I am suggesting, however, is that if the university is to have
any “meaning” (a word all by itself more shunned in academia than
religious dogma) more than simply a localization of lots of
different stuff (staffs, faculties, offices, laboratories, collections), we
should be looking toward its value as an institution of education.
I am not talking here about anything remotely like
“dumbing down” of curriculum. What I am talking about, however,
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To the extent that specialist research insists that its current
investigations are simply too complex to be understood by anyone
not devoting their entire career to it, that the research results can’t
even regularly be translated into some ideational shape that can
and must be entered into wisdom-seeking conversations, then
maybe it should be occurring somewhere else. I am speaking of
conversations, in the most inclusive and disparate senses of that
word. And these conversations should be regularly entered among,
not simply scholars of other research disciplines, but also as
emerging conversations among students who, even at their young
age, can be held to participating in such discussions as an integral
part of their education.
If the specialist and subspecialist investigators insist that
there is no meaningful translation, either because their
investigations haven’t matured enough for them to understand
patterns that can be conveyed, or because they simply don’t have
the time for it, it does not follow that such research should not be
pursued. There are lots of places to do that, and they are called
550
research institutes, not universities, and they can be public or
private, attached to a museum or a company, a branch of
government or the gift of a philanthropist. To think that every one
of these outposts of either esoteric or commercial research must
also find a place on the university campus, whose presence ramifies
out into the solidification of minutely cordoned-off disciplines as
the point of the institution, is an exercise of sleight-of-hand
composition of fluffy mission statements to potential consumers at
best, and is a deliberate act of deceptive surrogacy-marketing at
worst.
If we are to succeed in seeking wisdom, one of the first
things we must do, culturally, is come clean about what we mean by
education, and get on with doing that. It doesn’t matter how much
we open up admissions to include the all of those who have been
excluded historically when we have tacitly redefined what
education is for. If education is not about seeking to produce new
wisdoms, then it is just so much technical training for a particular
job, and we should call it that. Would anyone seriously contend
that one needs a degree from a prestigious research university so

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that one can “survive and thrive” in the “information economy,” and
that the reason for this is because there is some profoundly superior
wisdom in the curriculum of a Harvard but not a state university?
And yet it is true that with an Ivy degree in hand you are much
more likely to get recruited for a position in a law firm,
international business, or at the Department of State. Why? It is
like gold. It is simply, by definition rare and therefore it has caché
and social privilege.
Every literate person has heard the statistics of how few
college graduates know that the earth goes around the sun and not
the other way round, how many people think that dinosaurs and
cavemen were walking around at the same time, and so on. If you
want to scare a bunch of students tell them you are going to give
them a verbal science literacy test, where they have to answer
things that “everybody should know” one at a time, in front of
everyone else. One could equally scare a lot of competent scientists
if you put them in a room and told them that you were going to
ask them questions out of their disciplines that everyone should

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know—in fact, I think they would be abjectly terrified by the
prospect of showing their ignorance. The fact is that most science
and mathematics is not easy to master (like the dog standing on its
hind legs), and not everyone will be equally adept at it, and, yes,
there are a few who seem “hard-wired” for it and pick it up right
away, and that’s wonderful. I honestly wish them every insight
their peculiar talents might reveal, and I hope they will return with
them to the larger conversations of society and the academy so
that I can learn of them as well.
However, trotting out rationales for an educated public, and
specifically for scientific literacy, so that our children will survive in
the “Information Age” is ludicrous. The reason to learn science at
any age is because it is intensely fascinating, so engaging that it is
absolutely worth the effort: not so you get a good grade, get into a
good college, and (the ultimate bottom line) get a good job to
compete in a global economy. For every legislator who rants about
how we’re falling behind, trying to scare parents that their kids are
falling behind, I want to ask them (the legislators) to do a long
division problem by hand or add two fractions, things we expect of

553
our third graders. A lot of people do very well in the “knowledge
economy,” without knowing a lot of things that simply make life
more interesting. How many lawyers or surgeons or economists or
investment bankers (just picking from a sampling of knowledge
economy winner professions) could give a coherent explanation for
why we have different seasons, or why the Reformation was
important? This is fairly fundamental stuff, here; we are not talking
about jargon or arcana. And if we have now decided that a
university education is for the training of youngsters in techniques
they need to earn a living, then why don’t we send them to very
efficient professional training schools, for a fraction of the cost and
time?
When I think of the roughly seven hundred years that we
have had formal universities in western culture, and I think of the
small sliver of the populations who had the privilege to enter those
institutions, I do find that social exclusivity profoundly lamentable,
and at several levels. At the first level is the individual herself or
himself. It is lamentable to think of the vast numbers of

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individuals who existed in societies in which great ideas existed,
but not for them. And in this perception, of course, it is not just
the cloistered institutions that were not open to the wider public,
but literacy itself was rare, along with the sorts of conversations
in which one can engage when literate. To the extent that
university diplomas became conflated with realms of association
and much later with entry into professions, of course it is also
lamentable that many individuals were effectively blocked from
seeking to occupy those careers when they could perceive the
injustice of it all up close on the cultural landscape.
However, I also think that this trajectory of education, to
the extent that it ever was concerned with seeking wisdom
through great conversation, as it has been at times, was greatly
impoverished by the monocultural voices that were permitted in
the conversation. To the extent that such areas as gender studies
and multicultural studies have become part of the conversation,
and not just another discipline, they certainly have the potential,
and in some instances have even succeeded, in bringing a richer
conversation and different lines of sight toward wisdoms to the

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table. What I don’t find particularly sad, however, lies at the level of
discipline advancement, as though particular narrow disciplines
were some sort of sacred trust. I don’t, for example, wring my
hands over just how much further along surgical techniques, or
chemical engineering might be if only we had not been so unjustly
biased in whom we educated for so many years. At that level, once
one has defined the parameters and boundaries of a particular line
of inquiry, I don’t know that anyone by their heritage, ethnicity or
gender, is any more likely than anyone else to find the next set of
data or define the next technique.
To think in this way follows the same logic and view of
professions and disciplines that actually occurs within disciplines
and subdisciplines in the academy. The general arc of disciplines
during the last century has been not to differentiate its emerging
specialists from their mentors through larger conversations among
the whole university. Instead the prescribed path is to tunnel
deeper, and to support the identity and significance of the original
disciplinary boundaries by multiplying capillaries in support of the

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discipline. This patterning is seen in every field of inquiry, whether
the end point of training in that field falls under the category of
the “professional” (business, medicine, law, and management being
the new counterparts to the original professions), or whether the
category falls under the heading of the academic. This latter broad
category includes the arts, sciences, and humanities, where the
recipient of advanced training is expected to continue deepening
the paths of inquiry, and where the most traditional expectation
for employment was that the student would himself or herself
become a professor of that discipline.
Again, what one sees at ground level and across time bears
the imprint of some very unsurprising human tendencies. If
someone sees his or her life primarily in terms of devotion to a
discipline, which defines and justifies itself through limited-
membership association and the publication of intensive journals
whose titles capture in physical form what life in that discipline is
about, it is not surprising that the established generation would
desire to see their work continued. The continuing existence of
their discipline, through a rising generation of specialist scholars

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and their subsequent publications, serves to satisfy a deeply-felt
psychic desire that what they have been about is larger than
themselves, but that their life’s work will be preserved within that
canon, nonetheless. At the level of the individual, it is an attempt
to secure immortality, if only just a bit of it, and, considering the
amount of time and effort many academics pour into their work,
sometimes to the exclusion of nearly everything else, it is
understandable.
However, when these psychic draws play out they tend to
impress a very definite set of expectations on the life of an
academic. Graduate students become not just apprentices, but
almost surrogate children. Even with this implicit relationship,
which is odd considering that the age of graduate students, in the
main, does not place them in the role of children in any other
aspect of life, there are better and worse ways to conduct a parent-
child relationship. Some parents don’t care what their kids do, as
long as they don’t bother them too much. Some parents are so
intent on seeing their offspring as an extension (and thereby

558
justification) of their own lives that they become overlords of their
children’s development, training, and choices, and nothing will get
in the way of that child becoming exactly the preconceived vision
that the parent has foreordained. Examples of this crop up in all
walks of life, but we tend to hear about them in arenas of
popularly understood celebrity, such as professional tennis or
Olympic gymnastics.
There is an important distinction in the world of academics
from that of the traditional parent-child relationship. The mentors
in academics maintain the authority to choose their pool of
potential acolytes, and they maintain the right to refusal
throughout the duration of apprenticeship. And so, once again, it
has been quite natural throughout most of the history of academic
research, that if all this psychic weight of association and
continuation were part of the process of mentoring the rising
generation, that professors would be much more likely to select out
their acolytes if they simply felt more affinity toward them, if
these students actually could confer something of the sense of
progeny. Academics were, of course, much more likely to gravitate

559
toward students in whom they could see themselves at an earlier
stage of life.
vi.) The future of education: formal and informal
There are some very definite implications for what we
might expect of our educational process that proceed from both
historical precedent, and from the nature of systems of knowledge
and wisdom traditions. Our expectations must also be informed by
the needs of contemporary society, which were not apparent to
earlier generations. In discussing these implications I must also
relate a debt of gratitude to many others. In fact, no one, and least
of all myself, can stand apart from their associations and claim
ownership to insight. Many of the topics I will be taking up are
already on the landscape as operating exemplars, often without
much fanfare, within certain universities and colleges, as well as in
K-12 levels, and within communities. I cannot provide a
comprehensive listing of these programs, and I am sure there are
far more examples in operation than those of which I know. But I

560
am always surprised to find how many times, when I think I have
hit upon a truly novel idea, that someone else has not only thought
of it but has even organized a functioning program.
I should like to begin with ideas about post-secondary
education, and especially the notion of a college or university
education considered broadly; and then move both forward and
backward to explore implications for older adults and pre-college
age students. In doing so I shall to draw upon themes already
discussed. In this process I wish to bring into more concentrated
focus the purposes of education, as a public trust and cultural
value, and at any level. In order to do this most concisely and
sensibly, I need, once again, to make several more short
illuminating excursions.
In 1950 the famous mathematician and computer scientist
Alan Turing proposed his test for identifying a computer capable of
Artificial Intelligence (AI), if one should ever claim to have been
constructed. The test would involve a human tester holding
conversation with two other conversants whom he could not see

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(presumably through a keyboard and screen). One of the
conversants would be an adult human and the other conversant
would be the presumptively intelligent machine. There should be
no restrictions on subjects to be discussed, and one might easily
imagine a topic that a human would no nothing of and concede
that just as easily as the computer might not be informed on a
subject. Turing’s test is a statistical one. If in any number of
random conversations, the human tester could average no better
than mere chance in determining which conversant was human and
which machine, then the machine might justifiably be called
intelligent.
For years, AI researchers took Turing’s lead in trying to
create machine intelligence. However, as researchers Kenneth Ford
and Patrick Hayes have pointed out, this quest has proved not just
illusive, but it strongly indicates that the goal itself is missing the
point of machine cognition. They liken the power of the idea of
replicating human behavior for AI investigators to a similarly
powerful model during the nineteenth century with attempts to

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create mechanical, heavier-than-air flight. The desire for humans to
break their bonds with earth and fly, bird-like, has ancient roots.
But in the last century design after design was drawn and built
trying to accomplish that by emulating birds. The imagery of the
flying bird was so much with us, and so compelling, that a
succession of inventors could only imagine artificial flight with the
flapping of wings.
Only when the Wright brothers abandoned that model did
mechanical flight become possible. Once the new paradigm became
the basic formulation, inventors and engineers no longer tried to
make something like a giant artificial pigeon, which is both
unworkable an unimaginably complex. But then again, as Ford and
Hayes put it so well, “no bird can fly at 45,000 feet or faster than
sound.” In their work in computer cognition, Ford and Hayes are
urging that rather than trying to emulate processes which humans
do extraordinarily well and quite naturally, researchers should
rightly be looking for avenues where machine qualities are vastly
superior to human, and for interfaces where machines can extend

563
our fundamentally human qualities to enable us to exploit our
humanness more fully.
In deciding what kind of education is worthy for humanity,
we should fully appreciate what we find remarkable about our
species, and what we would like to understand, experience, and
accomplish as a fitting response to the gift of being alive. This
does not mean that because computers can do mathematical
operations much more effectively than humans, and even in some
cases construct mathematical proofs, that mathematics is an area
we can write off as non-essential. The point is not for us to beat
the machines in this case, but there is a very singular human
experience to be had in studying mathematics. Machines can also
compose and perform music, but that does not in any way diminish
what a human being experiences by studying and performing music.
Some of the things that seems to make us, as a species,
unique include our abilities to synthesize information into systems
of knowledge, and even to synthesize those systems of knowledge
into larger and distinct insights. We are also able to empathize, as I

564
have previously used that term, namely to transpose our individual
experience and translate our wisdom to understand episodes and
individuals whose experience is very distinct from our own. And
this latter ability includes both laterally across contemporary
cultures, but also through time. Most singular of all to the human
condition is the ability to take these syntheses and empathies to
project futures, both immanent and remote, including not just the
details of trend-line extrapolations, but to imagine the qualities of
possible futures we may desire. This is the process of envisioning,
as opposed to simply the technical skills of prediction. The
suggestions to come are those that would foster envisioning, but I
think we can do much better than simply hope that envisioning will
arise as a mental version of natural selection.
In seeking to ask ourselves to envision, the insights of
specialized disciplines are essential resources to which we should
all be privileged. There are even examples where the deep pursuit
of a discipline has led the individual investigator to wonderful new
visions with far-ranging implications. The example sited above of
the neuroscientist Karl Pribram is one. Lewis Thomas, the late,

565
celebrated cell biologist and essayist is another. After decades of
peering through a microscope and adding specialized knowledge to
his discipline, he found himself one day essentially “falling through
his microscope,” very much like Alice falling through the looking
glass. And what he envisioned as a result was that the life and
organization of a single cell was emblematic of nothing so much as
the world, taken as a whole.
Of course, we are all social creatures as well, and no one
can declare absolutely the boundaries of the influences that their
own insights. Or, in other words, we can never be sure what kinds
of conversation with other individuals or with our entire
encounter of life and the world give rise to insights. Still, these
truly expansive insights can arise and take shape within individual
humans, and this ability, so far as we can tell, belongs exclusively to
our species, and has no counterpart in artificial intelligence.
Profound insights, syntheses, and wisdoms are available to
individuals in conversation with a larger world. Wisdom can also
be localized, in many individuals (perhaps holographically), and not

566
only reside as separate pieces of information held by billions of
individuals, only becoming something larger when taken in
aggregate by some meta-human intelligence.
Let me explain by analogy to other systems of intelligence,
living and artificial, why the ability of individual humans to
synthesize understandings of large patterns of human culture is
so significant. First, I do not believe that human thought and
wisdom are “merely emergent” qualities. By that I mean that they
are merely artifacts of something else, or that they can be
accounted for by simply saying that the trillions of neurons in our
brains are firing as a huge mass of (in computing terms) parallel
processors, which when allowing for non-linear variables of
positive and negative reinforcement produces any of the most
profound sorts of projections (for example, deep empathy and
imagined futures) which characterize humans. Even if strict
material-reductionist interpreters of intelligence do, in fact, believe
that this is how the human faculties work, the fact remains that we
have nothing in the realm of scientific investigations that support
this theory. That is, we have not produced any examples of

567
networked cognition that resemble empathy or projection, not just
in an entire network of simple organisms, but where each member
of the network can be petitioned to express awareness of the
whole.
Some would disagree, of course, and if my presumption
turns out to be wrong, fine. I welcome any new insights, and prefer
to embrace them, rather than base my intentions and actions on
ignorance. In the field of artificial intelligence, for example, there
have been some stunning advances, which have already challenged
our notions of intelligence. We can already build electromechanical
robots that, singly, can seem to behave very much like single
insects, say a cockroach or a termite. Of course, some insects such
as ants, bees, and termites are by their nature highly social. Put a
single bee or termite in a Plexiglas container and observe it, and in
fact it doesn’t do anything all that interesting. It may be attracted
to light, repelled by certain other stimulants, and outside of that
just kind of buzz around randomly looking for a way out.

568
Put thousands of bees together, or termites, and suddenly a
very different overall behavior takes place, which one cannot get at
by looking at the behavior of the isolated insect. Bees and ants
differentiate in their behaviors, producing very elaborate patterns
in their activities and in the physical structures that result from
their activities. Yet it is very difficult to imagine how one (human
investigator) might petition the information from any individual of
the colony, which gives rise to such a complex hive and social
activity. One possible insight from social insects is that, to a
considerable extent, intelligence might simply be emergent. That
is, with only a very few rules of operation, large numbers of such
organisms will collectively produce what looks to the human
observer as intelligence. When operating with pure information,
that is snippets of recursive computer code, we can also induce a
kind of patterning emergent order that might appear as, for
example, a colony of insects. Perhaps we can get colonies of little
autonomous robots to form such patterns of association as well. It
is an interesting proposition, and one can only imagine what
further insights could be pursued. The human observer sees

569
patterns and dynamics that are highly suggestive, but we still don’t
know if it would be possible in these aggregations of stimulus-
response organisms (whether live insects, robots, or evolving
computer subroutines) to petition any of the elemental parts and
get that pattern, holographically, to make itself manifest.
One test that the patterning of real insects is merely
emergent (as some consider the activities of the human brain) and
open-ended (that is, there might be some indication that we could
extrapolate the theory of aggregations of simple rule-bound
organisms to explain even higher-level behaviors that look even
more like human consciousness when viewed aerially) might be to
put a lot of social insects, say termites, in an artificial and
“supercharged” environment. Colonies of certain termites in their
natural environment produce physical structures that to the casual
observer (not knowing what he is looking at) seem to be a fairly
large sculpture, and likely the result of human fashioning. Suppose
one were to place these termites in a large but enclosed area, with a
very rich and continuous food supply, and being careful to remove
570
waste products so they don’t poison themselves or suffocate, and let
them multiply. What might happen?
Would they, by the principle of emergence but amplified
artificially by an order of magnitude, build even more complicated
structures than they had ever been observed to do in the wild?
Would they simply seek to isolate themselves into the same rough
numerical groupings that they would in the wild, and build a lot of
the same stuff ? Would we observe, even with the problems of
nourishment and waste seen to, that their social informational
structure simply can’t adapt to their being a significantly higher
concentration of population, and they would switch into a
previously unseen default mode and all kill each other? Among all
the other things I am not, is an entomologist. I don’t know what
would happen in such an experiment, or whether, perhaps, such
experiments have already been done.
Yes, there are those who would maintain that the human
mind is merely emergent. Perhaps, but I don’t feel that we are. I
cannot prove that we are not although I see plenty of indications

571
that seem to suggest that to me. At its base I can only say that I am
impelled to believe it at a level one might call spiritual, and that to
the very best of my ability to distinguish the difference among
sources of insight, that this belief of mine is not simply a romantic
desire to preserve the dignity of the self, or even more to the point,
of myself. However, even if one is determined to reduce the human
mind (and I don’t mean by this only the physical organ we call the
brain) to a manifestation of merely emergent interactions within
some variation on the theme of a massively-parallel computer, we
are still left with qualities that are not just remarkable, but so
magnificent that we should be actively seeking to encourage them.
These I have already mentioned, but may now be more clear in
their interpretation.
While we may not know how, or if it is possible, to petition
knowledge from an individual insect that would reveal the social
operation of an entire colony, or, for that matter, whether such
might be possible to evince from a colony of robots or lines of
evolving computer code, we do know that individual humans have

572
the ability to comprehend global concepts of structure and
development. Furthermore, we know that as global concepts and
structures change, the individual human can perceive and
understand change. Beyond that, we know that individuals can
imagine all sorts of things not simply before them, either as
immediate landscape or transferred remote information, such as
from a book, although these sorts of informational patterns have
the potential to help catalyze the imagination of the mind.
And as I have been urging, we also have the capacity for
empathies, meaningful envisionings, and wisdoms. I think it is
essential, at this point in the evolution of human consciousness,
that we realize these qualities, that we seek to encourage them in
everyone, and that we make the cultivation and expansion of these
qualities explicit in what and why we teach our students, of any
age. Of course, it is difficult to encourage our students to seek
wisdom, and to generate new wisdoms, if we (as teachers, mentors,
parents, and brothers and sisters in the human family) do not
believe ourselves that this is really what our children and we are
uniquely called to do. If we do not believe in this transcendent life

573
work, then the only encouragement for a meaningful future we can
offer our students is to try to pack into them as much as we
currently know, and wish them good luck.
As we proceed to consider some particulars for educational
patterns of content and learning structures that would proceed
from the pull of encouraging new syntheses and wisdoms, several
ingredients are, and will always be, significant. The first is the idea
that collective insights are of a different nature from individual
insights although once elaborated these insights can be
comprehended and taken further by individuals. The learning
structure that produces collective insights is, taken most broadly,
conversational and multi-modal, rather than unidirectional, from a
single source to a passive receiver, whether the receiver is an
individual or a group. However, in constructing environments for
such conversational learning we must be aware of certain
responsive tendencies that seem to be part of our natures.
To begin, as we all know, if we have taken part in various
aspects of the culture of information, especially computer-

574
mediated communications, there are thresholds of both individual
mental attention and the number of sources and amount of
information presented that must be respected, and to a considerable
degree we can find cues to these thresholds in face-to-face
conversation. If you are in the company of many people, say, at a
meeting for a purely social party or for a meeting with an agenda,
in the time before everyone settles down (to dinner, or a series of
presentations), the aerial view would be somewhat very chaotic and
certainly noisy. If you were to hang a microphone from the ceiling
and listen, without being able to visually look at individuals, it
might be impossible to discern anything but an ebbing and
swelling of overall noise that sounds kind of like people, but,
outside of the occasional booming laughter or shout, you might
not be able to discern any separate words at all. And in fact, actors
and sound technicians can do a fairly good job of producing this
large scale effect by generating a whole bunch of meaningless
words, syllables, or phonemes (hubbub, hubbub, homina, homina,
etc.).
575
If we are actually in this group of people, or if the aerial
sampling is supplemented by video, one finds that people tend to
group into either dyads, triads, or perhaps groups of no more than
six for conversational success, and they face each other to pick up
on full body expression and vocal tonalities, which allows them,
mentally, to focus and filter the huge amount of stimuli into a
small subset with which they can engage. In my own experience
from teaching in conversational seminars, I have found that even in
the most idealized setting, where extraneous noise is absent, where
the pursuit of a single topic is expected and encouraged by all
participants, and with a skilled facilitator who can help both to
catalyze discussion directions and provide a respectful participation
of active listening, and where all participants are able to fully see
each other and read inflections and emotional tones of consonance,
dissonance, and urgency, the number who can fully participate
simultaneously roughly doubles from the number who can
participate in a random, or audibly challenging context. That is, it
seems that even for a well-modulated conversation with focus built

576
in, the number of active participants can be very effective with
numbers of a dozen to, perhaps, fifteen. Larger groups seem to fall
into a necessary division into more appropriate sizes of critical or
sub-critical mass.
Even given these structural elements of a “learning
community,” which I alluded to earlier, transcendent syntheses and
wisdoms that are life changing for the participants are likely, but
not always assured. It also helps if the teacher involved is herself
sensitive to the directions most catalytic to these syntheses and
wisdoms, and can help all the participants recognize their
emergence and draw attention to it. This awareness of a gifted
facilitator is a sensitivity much like that of an artist, who can frame
even the mundane and present them as wondrous, things we
normally are predisposed to not notice because, as Wittgenstein
said, they may seem simple, familiar, or just always with us.
Powerful insights and rich conversation become the order of
the day if the teacher does not simply notice these things from
time to time, but actually projects very real expectations that

577
epiphanies of wisdom will occur, with regularity, and that the
students should likewise cultivate an expectation of them from
among themselves. In short, it helps immensely if the teacher
cultivates a heightened awareness of envisioning among students.
Rather than try to elaborate on all of the various events and
episodes that might be signatures of this kind of learning, I would
do much better by referring the reader to someone who has already
written about them from personal experience, and in ways more
eloquent than I could write them. I would hope that everyone who
is passionate about education might avail themselves of the words
of Parker Palmer, in his recent book, The Courage to Teach: exploring
the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. This monograph is by far the
most significant and inspiring book I have read about education as
a transcendent path, written by an educator. In the main I don’t
make a point of reading books about education, as they are nearly
always devoid of vision and are mere technical surveys or policy
studies written in service of flatland presumptions and goals
(especially, national competitiveness in the global market economy),

578
and are produced by individuals who seem never to have
experienced transcendence in teaching themselves.
Where might these observations lead us when considering
the landscape of education as a whole? It is time to elaborate some
particulars, but I wish to mention, again, that these particulars, in
many instances, have found expression in various institutions and
locales, and that further, this elaboration is intended to simply help
in the process of a cultural envisioning, rather than providing a
concrete and immutable model. And for almost any wonderful
example, there are wonderful exceptions that seem to be very
nearly opposites, and so any particulars given are, at the very least,
encouraging of variations and modulations many of which are
beyond our current imagining.
I would hope that everyone has had at least one teacher in
his or her life who was truly inspiring. If you were so fortunate,
sometimes that teacher was one who expressed the very sorts of
qualities of larger syntheses, vision, and encouraging as creative
agents, working as a learning community. But I know that these

579
are not the only model teachers who have positively affected
students’ lives, when I have asked them who their best teachers had
been. Some memorable teachers focused in on certain students with
individual mentorship, and some had been so fascinated with the
implications of the insights of a particular discipline that they
almost seemed to forget the students, but somehow pulled the
students into their enchantments.
What these responses tell me is that there should always be
room for exemplars of different stripes able to express their own
particular passions and personalities, and not every effective and
inspiring teacher can be shoehorned into a singular model or
structure. After all, such variety is part of the grandeur of the
human experience. Where we continue to err in our educational
systems is only partially structural, but it is nothing so simple as
merely a problem of no structure (leaving students adrift) or too
much structure (killing the creative agency of the teacher),
although both extremes have been attempted and have failed. We
wish both teachers and students to be creatively engaged and

580
enthralled by the experiences they share. We must take care to
avoid imposing structures of education that are inimical to broader
possibilities of encouraging experiences that inspire our students
as creators of knowledge, wisdom, and visions. My suggestions,
therefore, are of a kind that can serve as points of departure in
structures and purposes that encourage the seeking and forming of
deep insights and wisdoms among many students, rather than as
the preserve of a few students who simply have a gift for
envisioning and an awareness of that gift.
The sorts of structures that I think might encourage and
catalyze more vision, a more transformational educational
experience, and richer lives of engagement, then, are those which
embody the art of conversation as a primary goal and recurring
ingredient. Courses, especially at the level of general education, are
designed around grand themes, as opposed to a checkerboard of
catechisms of single disciplines. They engage large questions in
which the individual students are invited to synthesize past
knowledge with current information and realities, to find the limits
of their understanding, the paths most richly inferred for future

581
investigation and synthesis, and a constant reference back to the
learning community itself as a source of wisdom. That means
keeping track of the trajectories of individual and communal
insights, a biography of ideas as the course progresses, and using
that biography and those trajectories as themselves worthy of
further discussion and analysis.
In other words, the “text” of the course is not just the
variety of books and other information used to inform
conversation, but the learning community also generates, over the
course of the semester, its own text of synthesis and
understanding, every bit as worthy of penetrating inspection as
the text of the published authors. Every course taught should have
as a part of its implied purpose a deeper understanding of the
experience of creating wisdom, and when students are working
these themes out, intensively and in the company of each other,
they are by that very dynamic structure immersed in the
transformative experiences of empathy and transposition of the
self.
582
Once again, if we as educators are true to our missions and
statements of purpose, we cannot hope to be effective mentors if
what we expect of our students is completely distinct from what
we expect of ourselves. If we actually do embrace the idea of
interdisciplinary learning communities for our students, but
ourselves remain separate from other communities of learning, we
are not providing anything like a working vision to our students.
For example, at many institutions there are courses offered on
occasion that are billed as interdisciplinary. In operation they are
often coordinated by one professor at a time, offered to large
lecture sections where all information flow is unidirectional, and
where the spectrum of disciplines is presented as a series of
specialty lecturers who appear in succession to give a lecture on
their own deep-tunneling research that is supposed to fit into some
bigger theme. These lecturers are themselves usually not invested
in any significant way in the development of the course themes,
they don’t attend each other’s lectures, and their appearances are
like a series of pinch-hitters, brought in one at a time for a
succession of “at bats.”

583
Calling these “sampler shows” an interdisciplinary course,
as a student experience, is kind of like putting a red rock next to a
white one and calling them both pink. If the succession of pinch
hitters have no interest or time to discuss, as a learning community,
what a transdisciplinary pursuit of meaning might lead to, why do
we expect our eighteen-year-old freshman to see anything at all in
the passing parade? Instead, they have been presented with
(ostensibly as some kind of exemplars of wisdom and
achievement) a serial exposure to specialists who find it laughable
that they themselves should be generalists, let alone
conversationalists. Furthermore, there is no presumption that the
students themselves might bring anything to the table of
discussion that is worthy, original, and perhaps even catalytic in
producing insight in any one of the succession of lecturers.
I do think that there will always be a valuable place for
discipline-specific research. However, taking those disciplines and
subdisciplines as the summit of education, and then reading them
back on what we expect of students is not merely a mistake and

584
unproductive, it is toxic to the imagination and spirits of our
students. We may also want to continue to have research institutes
for even deeply-tunneling disciplinary investigations on the
campuses of our universities. Yet even these institutes, I believe, in
order to constitute anything even vaguely representing the original
meaning of university and contributing to the generation of
general wisdoms (deliberately plural) and their transmissions
should be able to engage, at some level, with learning communities,
and not merely among their cohort specialists at other institutes.
At the level of faculty, I do not think it particularly useful
to make a simple bifurcation between “teaching faculty” and
“research faculty.” Nor is it particularly helpful in generating new
wisdom to simply coerce those called research faculty into
grudgingly teaching a few graduate seminars in their narrow
specialty, or even more grudgingly to teach a general education
level biology course (for example) once every two years. I don’t
particularly care whether specialty researchers who are
exceptionally good at what they do teach at all. I do think that in
order to be a meaningful and functional part of a university, the

585
mission of an institute should include a need to be to be engaged in
conversational communities of some sort, and not only giving, but
receiving suggestions on the meaning of what they are doing and
how best to translate that for the enrichment of the educational
mission of the university’s students at large.
However, the qualities of educators who can truly inspire
students, collaborate in the evolution of learning communities that
foster wisdom and seek ever new insights, are even more rarefied
than those of the gifted researcher. These are individuals who are
not teachers by default, instead of becoming something else. They
are intensely curious about all sorts of things, and driven by the
joys of transcendent experiences among their students. They can
inspire students to see visions in their own conversations, and
stimulate resonances of recognition among their colleagues and
students. As these mentors eagerly participate in and encourage
such conversation they teach, by example, envisioning as a way of
life and an exhilarating goal for education. Individuals need to see
this process in action, to be part of active questing conversations

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that extend and overlap over the course of semesters and even
years to catch the vision of its transcendent significance. To be in
such company is life changing, and certainly a worthy cause around
which to build a university, and a noble goal for the cultures that
embrace them.
I would like to try even more specificity, by way of
examples, to clarify ways to manifest such prospects for education
as cultural and institutional goals. Once again, though, I feel
constrained to emphasize that these are examples, only. Without
highlighting that strongly felt aspect of specific teaching activities
as revealing of qualities of learning communities (that they serve
as catalysts for further visions), the very elaborations of examples
can easily be seen as more constricting, more prescriptive, and less
admitting of creative variety. We need specific examples from the
classroom to make the vision sensible, without insisting that those
examples are also the final word on curriculum or technique. The
danger of confusing examples for final and universal imperatives is
one reason why individuals writing this or that observation of
cultural trends often prefer to remain at the level of critiquing that

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which is patently broken. And to the extent they offer suggestions
of a positive nature, these analysts often remain at the level of
generalization that admits of universal agreement but no ideas for
implementation. And so, having tried to avoid being
misunderstood, I will make some further observations that seem to
be useful, from personal experience.
One of the more notable examples of programs begun at
universities to generate some version of a larger vision among
students was inaugurated well into the period of the paradigm of
the research university in this country. These were called the
“Great Books” programs. The most famous was the great books
program inaugurated at the University of Chicago by one of
America’s preeminent thinkers and reformers in education, Robert
Maynard Hutchins. Chicago was already renown as a world-class
research university in both established and emerging disciplines in
the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities when Hutchins
assumed the presidency there in 1929, where he remained until
1945 when he became Chancellor until 1951. Hutchins was

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strongly disposed toward a program for undergraduate education
that seems almost like an update of the original university
philosophy of Scholasticism, which included a study of the great
philosophical works through history, as well as logic, rhetoric and
mathematics.
For all its merits, I do not think this curricular structure is
the most appropriate one for our time. I do not make this judgment
lightly, out of deference to winds of fashion, such as the increasing
pressure to produce specialized research to serve a highly technical
society, or to avoid the huge flap that emerges when anyone
actually tries to list what the essential cannon of wisdom ought to
be that students should learn. Instead, I feel that that a fixed
content, great books program is missing the mark because it does
not sufficiently address other realities of our times. In avoiding
these powerful and emerging intellectual, cultural, and social
themes of our times, such a curriculum misses the most fecund
approaches to inspire students, to involve them in great discussions
of evolving wisdoms, and ultimately to encourage them to envision
that which we, the larger culture, can only dimly perceive, if at all.
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In the first place (and I will for ease of explanation consider
the western canon here), whatever listing we might assemble of
critical and seminal thinkers of the past, were not merely original,
reaching however they might beyond the constructs of their own
flatlands, but they were also fully immersed in their times and
informed by it. A full appreciation of what made these thinkers rise
above their peers must include a full appreciation of their contexts.
To understand Aristotle in full, one must also ask what the world
looked like when he (Aristotle) got up in the morning! What was
the informing environment of “givens” and “obvious truths and
patterns of living and conversing” that were so much with
Aristotle that he doesn’t feel the need to even mention them? This
deep contextualization is very much worth doing, but we have
some very natural constraints on what we can do with any
program of education with real human beings and their developing
wisdoms as the purpose. Namely, there is not sufficient time in any
college curriculum, even if extended to five years for the
undergraduate program, to explore every cultural context of any

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pan-historical and pan-cultural listing of great books. We must
make choices about how much can be read and internalized, and
how best to take deep investigations of a finite number of subjects
with our students that will serve them as “wisdom examples,” as
they become life-long learners, and not always at a formal
educational institution.
Therefore, any successful model for education needs to
include the realization that we do not have an infinite amount of
time. Even if, as I will later suggest, we were to build into our
cultural assumptions of the good society a regular revisiting to
great discussions throughout life, we still must accomplish
meaningful results for our educational endeavors AT EVERY
STAGE, and not simply defer the possible realization of the
romance of learning and creating conversational wisdoms for
when we become octogenarians. This satisfaction of experiencing
meaning and wisdom in a reasonable amount of time is especially
crucial for our youngsters as they begin their journeys. Four years,
as perceived by an eighteen-year old is a very much larger fraction
of their lived experience to that point than it is for someone forty

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or sixty years old. And, it is at this very juncture when they are
most able to be truly inspired with what they might contribute to
the world, on the one hand, or convinced that the period of
apprenticeship they must endure before their opinions count for
anything are not worth the effort.
We should design our curricula in a manner that elevates
the meaningful participation of the student while not diminishing
the power or intent of the insights they encounter, and there are
ways to succeed which have the most wondrous effects on students
and faculty, especially if they are committed to the evolution of a
learning community. The first key is to invite synthesis of
knowledge by students as early and often as possible, even during
the first semester of their first year, and not wait until their senior
years when they have absorbed enough facts that we deem them
worthy of trying to assemble big-picture views of history or
literature or any of the arts and sciences. This means that we must
consciously design what we teach to allow meaningful synthesis at
regular intervals, based on limited information and knowledge that

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the students have learned. It also means that we must be kind, and
not slap down the student who, in seeking bigger patterns of
meaning, goes beyond his or her knowledge base at the time.
Why is it so crucial to develop the art of synthesis early in
the educational process? And what kinds of contemporary
curricula can take greatest advantage of opportunities for
synthesis? We find such informing keys even within the very
individuals who have endured for centuries as paragons of wisdom.
All of them were themselves not mere specialists, but were
marvelous synthesists of the variety of knowledge and experience
available to them at the time. Unless one is going to fall into the
trap of imagining some heroic age of intellectualism, broadly
distributed, in some past golden era, we must realize that our own
times are also producing masterful synthesists, and we are
squandering one of the best resources of our own time if we
ignore them.
In order to actualize these opportunities in our institutions
of learning, we must carefully consider our roles as educators, and

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what it has come to mean, professionally, to be an academic
specialist. Suppose that our culture, or even a given institution of
learning, were to consider it valuable for undergraduates, whatever
major they might choose to pursue, to also come away with some
knowledge of the arts and sciences more broadly. We know that
the majority of our current institutions fail miserably at this,
whatever collection of required general education courses we
throw at our students. Students forget nearly everything they are
exposed to after having passed the requisite tests. These results
seem to me to be expected, rather than a shocking result,
considering how we present our discipline-specific courses.
Suppose we also thought it to be useful to have some working
sense of the history of cultures, not divided up by artificial time
constraints. Now imagine simply throwing a bunch of specialized
researchers in a big room and asking them what counts for literacy
in their fields, and then locking the door until they could come up
with a curriculum that satisfied each of them, and would provide a
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between the ages of 18 and 20. If you are having a hard time
visualizing such an exercise leading to a successful vision, and not
wholesale bloodletting, or everyone retreating moodily to a corner
and refusing to participate in such an inhuman activity, you are not
alone. But to start with the aggregate of simply “what is,” or in
this case “what education has become,” as the necessary point of
departure may not be the most appropriate.
What if, instead of beginning with our current
configurations of professionalism and specialization and
institutional accretion, we start with something much simpler. We
need a concrete entity so distinct from the bureaucratic culture of
academicians that we can escape the tar-pit assumptions that
confound envisioning. Let’s start with a single book. For this
example I will suggest one of my personal favorites, realizing
there are many others one could choose from among. My
nomination for a book to catalyze thinking differently about the
culture of education is a contemporary masterpiece of synthesis:
Coming of Age in the Milky Way, by Timothy Ferris.

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Ferris has had a number of career titles, including
documentary filmmaker, science journalist, and professor of
science writing. His lifelong passions, however, have been
astronomy and cosmology, and he has written with extraordinary
eloquence for the larger public, seeking to awaken them to the
romance of this science. However, in Coming of Age, Ferris
exceeded the scope and vision of this exploration throughout
human history beyond anything I had previously seen. Yes, within
this single text the reader will learn a lot about astronomy, physics,
and cosmology, written in terms that the uninitiated can
understand without in the least compromising the ideas
themselves. That, in and of itself, is worth the price of admission.
But Ferris goes far beyond even these grand intellectual
quests. He goes back to ancient civilizations and describes the art
of map making, the sort of early exploration available by ship,
from when they were largely coast-hugging journeys because there
was no way to know where one was without landmarks, and of the
peril even in that. He talks sweepingly of ancient cosmologies, and

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what the cosmologies inferred about the meaning of life, individual
and cultural, among those who generated those cosmologies. Ferris
includes so many of the telling details, biographical sketches of
significant and often idiosyncratic personalities, the histories and
episodes as best we can infer them as lived experience within those
cultures, and all the wonderful scientific reaches. And what
emerges is the greatest drama of all as the driving force behind
this single book. That drama is the persistent, cross-cultural, and
timeless drive for humankind to find its place in the great
constellation of existence. The big story that pulls the reader into
this compelling adventure is that we make maps! Whether those
maps are local cartographies, cosmological maps, mythological
maps, personal memoirs, great literature, the rise of wisdom paths
and religions, indeed, virtually anything and everything, we, as a
species, are continually driven to find out the landscape of where we
are, and what it means to be there.
Taken this lyrically and grandly, an exploration of a field of
inquiry, like Lewis Thomas’s single cells under a microscope,
blossom through to a passionate vision and embrace of everything,

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of all we know. And such lyricism sets the mind in a state of
wonder and excitement. Wouldn’t such bold and open-ended
intellectual journeys give place and meaning to everything one
might experience or read from that point onward? Instead, our
most familiar curricula and methods feel like being buried beneath
subsets of information with no spiritual pull to it, information that
speaks to nothing resembling an inquiry of what and who we are,
and what we might become. One comes away from encounters with
studies that use the best synthesists for their points of departure
not just with a lot of knowledge, which is wonderful and
memorable because the knowledge has place and meaning, but also
with the very vibrant sense of a journey, of visions yet to unfold,
and a celebration that one is privileged to be on that journey. Such
encounters resonate and vibrate, and leave everyone aching to
continue in great conversations of our pasts and our futures. These
conversations are memorable, and they are ennobling.
If one were constrained to place such an educational
experience under a name, perhaps it might be called “Maps and the

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Human Experience,” where “maps” are considered as broadly as
described above. And such a curriculum would not only invite
specialists to see their own disciplines with an inviting and aerial
view, but would encourage them to value their own best insights in
wonderful collaboration, rather than competition, and being part of
these discussions among disparate faculty could not help but
inspire the participants. Now try to imagine if these same faculty
did not stop at these conversations, and reigniting their joys in
teaching, but saw it as a context to continue to pursue grand,
meaningful, envisioning conversations, reinventing their syntheses
and curricula every year.
What would such a learning community do for students
who saw their mentors engaged in such continual excitement and
envisioning conversations? What if the students were taught in
such a way that they could participate in these great conversations
as well, and indeed that this process of the dynamics of ever-
evolving syntheses was held out, explicitly, as why learning is so
precious and transformative? Now imagine these students, millions
of them, many choosing to further pursue discipline-defined

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professions, but having experienced the wonder of regular and
inspiring conversation in learning communities, being inducted
with open arms into other communities, into their society at large,
where we value them for their visions and conversation, and not
just their parochial technical skills.
Again, to return to the particular example of map-making
and the human experience, Timothy Ferris’ book is, for me, a
wonderful example of scholarship, of superb writing, and of
weaving a large transdisciplinary fabric that invites further
syntheses and envisioning. This is a favorite book of mine, and I
offer it only by way of example. It may not be one of the texts
chosen by other faculty, even if they were to contemplate a
curriculum whose overarching theme was the human drive to
explain their place, across times and cultures. There are other
works when arranged to illuminate large arcs of the human
experience that could be chosen, and it is important that the faculty
themselves be inspired by their choices. It is also true that students
arrive at college at many different levels of preparedness for such

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studies and conversations, and these abilities must also be taken
into account when designing curricula.
Perhaps a book such as Coming of Age in the Milky Way
would require many students to spend their first year developing
preparatory skills of engagement with such writings, as well as in
critique and synthesis, and in the skills one must bring to learning
communities, such as active listening, clear exposition, and
empathy. However, in my experience, courses that are simply about
acquiring information or a skill, and do not at the same time
engage an exciting theme that is not simply collected information
or the particular skill itself, more often fail than succeed and can
leave the students dispirited. Students must feel, and not as a
sophisticated ruse, that what they are about is worthy of itself, and
not merely paying the dues of apprenticeship before they can do
something interesting.
Another example comes to mind by way of the invitation to
genuine adventure and original thinking. In the Ferris book I’ve
been describing, one might generally capture its broad strokes in

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saying that it explores the ideas of human individuals trying to
comprehend where they stand and why. If one takes the trajectory
of contemplation and moves it in the other direction, that is the
human desire to understand the interior self, one is led inexorably
to equally expansive and compelling histories. Even if a professor,
or a group of faculty, were to take on this broad theme for a multi-
semester, transdisciplinary educational experience, the typical way
we approach such concepts is chronologically.
That is, one might examine the sense of the individual
implicit in shamanic cultures, in Homer, in the great monotheisms,
under imperial imperatives, etc. Later one might consider the
writings of Descartes and Shakespeare together as the first clear
evocations of the invention of the modern, western self, setting an
important cultural climate for Enlightenment concepts of
individual rights and so on. Then one might proceed to examine
the intellectual landscapes of the consciousness theorists (Freud,
Adler, Jung), and the rise of behavioralism, and on to postmodern

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considerations of the fractured selves in uneasy conversation with
each other. What a journey, indeed!
But is such a curriculum structure most suited to the life
experiences and intellectual and psychological contexts that 18, 19,
or 20-year-old students are likely to have? By working strictly
chronologically, one is beginning with a conception of the self that
is perhaps the most difficult for a present-day student to
understand. On the other hand to simply throw the students at any
of the other grand theories and their shifts presupposes that
students have an articulated model of the self that will be
surprised by the contrast and therefore will be awake to its
implications. How do you best begin a student on the path of
discovery and synthesis, so that, right away, they are awakened to
what they already know, to what they think they know, to what
they have never considered before, and to a conversation of
wisdom, and which will set their interests and drives to a high level
of alertness and eagerness?

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In this case another author comes to mind, which may or
may not be a favorite of faculty designing their curriculum. But I
immediately think of Oliver Sachs, and in particular his books The
Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and An Anthropologist on Mars.
I have used each of these books at different times and for different
courses, and besides being so beautifully written, they are, to me,
examples of a very high order of the distinctions between
information, knowledge, and wisdom. Sachs’ essays are all
thoroughly suffused with wisdom, not necessarily answers, but a
stunning aerial view of personal episodes of patients he has known
that certainly requires a lifetime of learning on Sachs’ part.
However, Sachs also expresses and evinces from his readers the
very high art of empathy, and this is what distinguishes wisdom
from even the most profound of intellectual theories.
If you are familiar with the works of Oliver Sachs, you
know that one of the remarkable signatures of his essays involves
individuals who, for various reasons, have lost some fundamental
element of perception or cognition that the rest of us take for

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granted. As a result, many of these individuals have reinvented
their core sense of self to accommodate these changes, and to
retain a coherent narrative of their world, in ways that are
breathtaking. Through the most stunning transpositions, Sachs
attempts to enter and understand their mental landscapes. I have
yet to introduce these books to students without their being deeply
moved, and provoked to ask questions on the nature of being and
consciousness which they eagerly admit they had never thought of
before. Sachs writes for the lay reader, providing all background
material (results of both his scientific training and his deeply
ecumenical interests) necessary to understand how and why these
episodes are so revealing and inviting to wonderment. Of course,
the more one has read and pondered before coming to his work, the
more one also appreciates the depth of insight and the artistic
beauty of the prose, but they can be approached and engaged by
first year students as well. And once they are drawn to this
magnificent adventure in exploring the human enigma, they are
much better prepared to find their own abilities to understand and
transpose their own models of self across time and cultures.

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It is essential for students to be explicitly informed that
they are embarking on a grand, expansive adventure right from the
start, from the first day they step on a campus. They must sense
that the faculty and the institution are genuine in this exciting
invitation to a grand adventure, and that wisdoms will emerge
conjointly among faculty and students alike. These wisdoms will
certainly have much in common from year to year if they are
tapping into insights that are not just random quirks but are
rooted in the human experience, from which we expect to find
more themes that persist than those which appear without patterns
or signifiers. However, it should also be expected, if the curriculum
is truly alive for faculty and students alike, that the class entering
one year will not have exactly the same experiences, themes, and
conclusions during their learning community conversations as will
the class entering the next year. I must emphasize, such variations
and unknowns as arise in learning communities (even between two
seminars simultaneously following the same syllabus) are to be
encouraged, not shunned. For in this vision of education, we are

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requiring the university to evolve once again. Once the university
was the place where one was expected to master the “received
wisdom,” to allow those of privilege to be the “bearers of culture.”
In the vision I am describing, we are asking students to help us
compose new wisdoms, and that creative act must be alive,
meaningful, and polyvocal.
Again, to use the example of languages, living and dead,
the surest signature that a language is no longer in use is that it
can be defined comprehensively and finally in a dictionary, however
large. It is only completely definable because it is a fossil, a fly in
amber, no longer a living organism. Faculty can make similar
inquiries of what is happening in their general education learning
communities. If the curriculum begins to take on the appearance of
a static catechism of insights, things which can be codified and
simply handed down, rather than evolved among the current
conversants, that is emblematic that the learning community has
lost its essential vitality, and has become a training academy. A
faculty involved in such an enterprise should be in regular
conversation with itself about the vitality of what it is doing. The

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students should be encouraged to synthesize, to create, and to offer
new wisdoms, not merely to emulate. And the students should also
be part of the conversation, at different levels and with some
regularity, about the work of that learning community.
As wonderful as the experience of such lively learning
communities can be, there are yet other elements that I feel
strongly should be included in the university experience. The first
is experience outside of the classroom, and not only of a
socializing nature. In this regard I am greatly heartened by the
intentional growth of opportunities, at many institutions, which
invite and encourage students to complement their formal studies
with experiences in the community and beyond. I find it very
encouraging to hear that volunteerism, student-initiated projects of
all sorts, and internships and fellowships with a wide spectrum of
organizations are becoming less the exception in students’ lives
and more the pattern of the day. They provide manifold
opportunities for students to receive spiritual fulfillment knowing
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It also allows them to become mentors, to seek out mentors of a
different sort than may be on campus, and to bring real world
experience back to their learning communities as they seek wisdom
and envisioning.
Another element I encourage students to avail themselves
of is something I call “deep practice.” By deep practice, I mean to
search for some particular passions, to follow them, and perhaps
attempt pursuits wholly new to them. The particular pursuit does
not need to be anything so structured as to be their declared major
or minor on the way to a degree although the student may decide
to do just that. Rather, I encourage them to immerse themselves in
at least one pursuit very different from what they normally do.
When students tell me, for example, that they are beginning to
study painting or sculpture, theatre or dance, or music, but
sheepishly admit that they don’t know exactly how they will
fashion those courses into a major or minor, I try to be quick to
reassure them that it is simply a wonderful opportunity for its own
sake. Of course, the passionate avocational activity does not need
to be in the arts, but it is a particularly immediate example for what

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I mean by “deep practice.” Perhaps most significantly, a deep
practice should involve a way of knowing, doing, and
understanding that illuminates the mind through different ways of
knowing from one’s usual studies.
Learning not just the history of music, or theory, but also
devoting oneself to being able to create music is an experience I
find difficult to describe in words. Music is a language, to be sure,
but it is so different from any other form of discourse that the
creation of music comes as a revelation to those who experience it.
It does bear some resemblance, I think, to the nature of
storytelling as described in the introduction, and also in the
example of the Laguna woman trying to help her composition
teacher understand the use and experience of story in the Native
American tradition. The creation of music at its best, no matter
what classification we give to the kind of music, calls every
participant to a completely different plane of mutual awareness
and transcendence. I feel fortunate to be at a school that has,
among other things, one of the best jazz programs in the country.
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The faculty are themselves accomplished artists of the highest
order, and they bring in top names for concerts and symposia with
the jazz students.
But I also love to go to the student concerts. True, they are
talented and devoted, and, they have mastered the techniques of
their instruments. Still, to see a combo of students, as a group, take
off on the most supernal flights of musical fancy is a marvel to
behold. Even with all their individual skills and ideas, when they
are in their groove they become an organism, and this higher state
of consciousness shows in every aspect of their physical being.
When the voicing is handed over to the pianist, or the acoustic
bassist, or a horn player, you can see the rest of them all light up in
the beauty of what is coming to life, you can feel their collective
imaginations, energy, and creative empathies feeding each other
and they all soar. There are light and beauty and pure visions
pouring forth, but no grandstanding. If anything, they seem
genuinely reticent to seek the audience’s recognition of the “one
great solo ride,” because as wonderful as those solos are, they don’t
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they are all having together. And I see the joy of co-creativity with
students as young as freshmen!
What ought to be university experience? Can we envision
one that could be transformative for the individual, and even more
transformative for the culture that embraces it and encourages it?
The culture that succeeds would be able to state, with excitement
and compassion and hope for its rising generation, that there are
wisdoms to be found. Such an institution, and its larger culture
would be clear that we have only intimations of what those
wisdoms may be, and we will do our best to help you in seeking and
acting on these wisdoms. We, as adults and mentors, could say this,
not apologetically, but by way of invitation to purpose and
meaning, for that is truly each new generation’s calling. By any
measure this is a great adventure, and the entering class should be
challenged to arrive at insights that we cannot yet perceive. We
need them to do that. Not just to find a niche in the information
economy, or even to be the equivalent of emergency room doctors
who will somehow repair all of the injuries that we have incurred.
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You deserve to experience transcendent joy in whatever pursuits
you choose. What we ask in return are your visions.
vii.) The Conversational Community: reading out from the university
There are several patterns that come immediately to mind
when considering the effects of learning communities, beginning
from the arena of the university and a formal educational
experience as they extend outward through society. These patterns
suggest activities and formats that may be attempted to most
effectively produce a coherent fabric for a society that values and
seeks to promote wisdom-producing conversations and their
applications. First of all, the concept of mentoring is central, but
there is no singular model for a worthy mentor. In the ideal case,
everyone ought to be both mentored and mentoring. Even within
the formal educational context, there is a significant and enriching
blurring between the lines of students and teachers in learning
communities.
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If there is a compelling underlying reason why mentoring
is effective in a formal institution of learning, we ought to be able
to translate this pattern into other social, professional, and cultural
contexts as well. In doing so, however, we need always keep in
mind that there are, in fact, different stages of psychological
maturity during the life of individuals. The stages of widening
understanding (of the self and the other, and of empathetic
understanding of other cultures at a given time, and also across
time) while not precisely age-specific, can still be used as general
guidelines for what sorts of learning community activities are
most appropriate for individuals and generations.
There are other considerations that arise from observations
of the historical insights we have of the nature of human
association. Here, I find myself harkening back to some of the
qualities of the “pastoral ideal,” which we have discussed in some
detail. You will recall that in one example of an agrarian
nineteenth century community, I posited a geographically located
community of perhaps several square miles, and with a population

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of something on the order of 500. The rationale behind using
these parameters was to make sensible the community
understanding and empathies that, among other things, directly
affected the sorts of communal policy decisions (politics) that
would arise.
That is, there are certain presuppositions that all
community members bring to their personal associations, as well as
to deliberations of what projects the community might undertake.
In the nineteenth century agrarian community, these
presuppositions included an implicit understanding that the
patterns of anyone’s productive activities were either identical to
one’s own work, or, in the case of those not engaged in farming,
were fairly easily comprehended by the rest of the community.
Furthermore, the very geographic proximity of the community as
well as the high degree of interpersonal connection, gave a very
concrete image to communal actions. What ever they decided to do
as a community, they were going to have to live with as a
community, and they would have to deal with its after effects as a
community of individuals known to itself.

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I am not suggesting that we turn back the clock, and
remake the world as an aggregation of early nineteenth century
agrarian communities. That is not possible, nor would it be
desirable for a host of reasons. What I am suggesting is that we
not automatically dismiss insights we might gain from this sort of
community, with their failings and successes, as we contemplate
how best to begin experimenting with the new wisdoms of
learning communities. We may need to pay attention to some of
the forms of social organization that formed, by default, before the
full expression of the Industrial Revolution, as a starting point in
envisioning the plurality of visions of the future of society.
The forms I am speaking of are those that most directly
foster the quality of empathy, for the transposition of one’s
personal view (the universe emanates from my eyes outward) to
other views of lived experience. One of the limitations of the
pastoral ideal was that, while such transposition was necessary for
cohesion and survival, it was often not very expansive. We tended
to cluster into groups, ethnic or religious, with whom we already

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felt there was a very high degree of commonality. Swedish
immigrant farmers tended to congregate into “little Scandinavias”
of communities, where they could continue speaking Swedish,
many families were already known to each other, and virtually
everyone was Lutheran.
The fact that these cultural commonalities also were defined
by geographic proximity produced more homogeneity, rather than
challenging the new community to come to grips with the meaning
of community in more diverse terms. In this country we have seen
a steady appearance of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic
subcommunities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It
has also become increasingly apparent since the middle of this
century that many other aspects of society impose centrifugal pulls
on this type of community establishment, and many of them are
simply the felt imperatives of economic life, including the
placelessness that results from professionalism and careers.
What is the meaning of geographic place in community,
and are there factors which not only translate into our current
617
society, but which must be factored into our next visions of social
structure? I would suggest that there are. However, these, again,
are intimations and extrapolations that may constitute good places
to start, but we may also find out that these factors are more fluid
than I would suggest and, fifty years from now, we may be finding
meaning and place in patterns that we cannot clearly see from the
present.
In looking for these parallels in evolving conversational
communities, let me repair once again to the educational learning
community where I have some direct experience. So, while we are
exploring reading qualities of learning communities out into the
larger culture, I need to describe a bit more of the conversational
community at the university for practical observations that may
illuminate social behavior and structure outside of the formal
campus. I would ask the reader to consider with me the following
observations for indicators of what may or may not be fruitful
dynamics for communities of many sorts: professional or collegial,

618
informal and town-centered, within and between generations,
school children to local mentors, etc.
As I’ve already described, when our students begin, they are
placed within seminar units, of about a dozen students, who meet
regularly for intensive seminar discussions with specific readings
guiding their explorations for each meeting. As a single class, these
students stay together for the entire semester; however, they also
meet weekly with, perhaps, four other seminars that are proceeding
through the same syllabus, for a total of about sixty students as a
class cohort. They very quickly get to know the other students in
their individual seminars, and many strong friendships are formed
in this first semester that last throughout their college years and
beyond. As they proceed to subsequent semesters, we, as faculty,
make a deliberate attempt to mix up the memberships of
subsequent seminars to increase the instigation of different lines of
inquiry among the students and to decrease the chances that
particular students might find themselves locked into a particular
expectations of opinion or social tendencies, and instead are able to
more freely allow both personality, creative tendencies, and

619
intellectual dispositions evolve. Furthermore, we try to have as few
repeats of students getting the same professors from one semester
to the next, although the combinatorics of a limited number of
students and faculty does not allow for no repetition of student
groupings in any semester.
So, what we have so far are groups of twelve to fourteen,
usually of similar age, who quickly bond intellectually and socially,
under the “hothouse” conditions of the intensive seminar, and the
unique larger context of simply going away to college where
young people find the opportunity to take on new ways of being
and presenting themselves that can be dizzying, but also let them
leave behind parts of themselves to which they were confined
simply through the inertia of peer expectation. Furthermore, the
larger group of about 60 students who are embarked on essentially
similar learning community experiences quickly get to establish
even larger patterns of friendship and intellectual association.
Finally, the enrollment at the entire Hutchins School of
Liberal Studies, both lower and upper division, ranges somewhere

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between four hundred and five hundred students. For students who
remain in this program beyond the two-year intensive sequence
(which they can use as an alternative to the traditional course-
matrix general education requirements and matriculate into any
other major) for their undergraduate degree, many other
associations, formal and informal, appear, which transcend age and
class, especially since many of our upper division students are “re-
entry” students, older than our entering freshmen, and with
completely different life experiences. Students have in recent years
initiated extracurricular discussion salons, publications, as well as
participating in great numbers in both on-campus groups, and off-
campus internships and fellowships.
As faculty, we have also inaugurated mentoring and
tutoring options within the course structure of the program,
where upper-division students can work on compositional skills,
seminar-related skills, and on-line publication with upper division
students. In short, what I have seen is a strong sense of
community at many levels, sustained by many webs of direct
contact and conversation, within the Hutchins program at large,

621
but with the most intense sense of community, in general, directly
proportionate to the amount of personal contact and work within
subgroups.
We have also, particularly over the last five years,
interwoven computer-mediated communications into many of our
courses. I find it most effective as an articulated conversational
space, where students can make further observations on topics
from the seminar, thereby extending the face-to-face seminar with
asynchronous written reflections, which serves to help students
elaborate their ideas if they are a bit reticent in a high-energy
seminar session, or who simply have insights that did not occur
until later, or for some students who are exceptionally articulate as
writers but less so orally. I have found it especially useful as an
adjunct to the seminar precisely because the electronically-posted
reflection is read and understood by others who know the
individual doing the writing very well, as a member of their
community, and they are very eager to highlight each other’s on-
line comments the next day in seminar.

622
I have also thought that it may be very useful to extend the
on-line adjunct of a seminar discussion to student-driven
communications with other campuses, in other parts of the
country or the world. However, my sense of how such an
arrangement would be most satisfying would not be to simply have
an open chat room where thousands can log on simultaneously, but
instead as an outgrowth of the seminar-level discussion, and of
the same dimensionality. For example, if seminars were being
conducted on two campuses, with the course co-designed by the
teachers at these two distinct locations, it might be a wonderful
way to enrich the possibilities of conversation and cultural
transposition to have those two, small, classes in private electronic
conversation with each other. There seems to be something about
the way human beings converse and process meaningful insights
(and not just disseminate data) that needs to be heeded here. Even
in a focused discussion, with the participants known to each other
and with good facilitation and all members acting as active
listeners, it seems that if the number in the conversation rises
much above twelve, that we begin to subdivide into groups that

623
again comport with our ability to actively listen, contribute, and
come away with meaningful synthesis.
The dynamics of on-line communication, admittedly, are
different. In the first place, they can take place asynchronously. But
when one looks at the vast networks that comprise computer-
mediated communication, one is hard-pressed to find anything that
resembles learning community conversations: intentional, active-
listening (reading) groups, committed to each other and to
evolving wisdom, and patient with the process. It is not that such
conversations cannot happen without finely tuned discussion
spaces; it is just unlikely. To the extent that such groupings do
evolve, it is frequently among people who already have a personal
connection, a face-to-face connection, established in a different
context. I have had plenty of people try to convince me otherwise,
but I have also taught research seminars investigating the nature of
community, and research seminars that have investigated (through
tiered experiments) the relationship between face-to-face
communications and computer-mediated communications

624
(including e-mail, listserves, BBSs, and MOOs and MUDs). I have
not been convinced from the evidence I have seen that those who
have insisted that their on-line experiences are chock-full of deep
and generative conversations understand what I am referring to by
those same words.
One of the most telling episodes for me, and this goes back
a number of years, was when a student assistant and I designed a
MOO-space (multi-user, object-oriented domain) to be able to host,
among other activities, a real-time, on-line equivalent of a seminar
discussion. If any readers have experimented with on-line MOO-
spaces you will recognize that what we were attempting was
radically different from the typical on-line MOO. In a typical
MOO-space (I had my students making visits to the granddaddy of
them, Lambda-MOO (run through a computer at Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center) the experience to the novice is mind-boggling.
When you log on as a visitor, you are given a computer-generated
alias character, like “PurpleGuest,” which you can modify or, if you
become a regular visitor you can gain extra rights to do things like
build your own virtual living space. These spaces, when we were
625
using them, were all text-only, meaning that even though there
were virtual objects all over the place, they were described in
words as you encountered them, like a Dungeons and Dragons
game. These objects could range from rooms, to seashores, to hot
tubs, to mirrors that you could “teleport” though to some remote
location.
When users logged on, there could literally be thousands of
other individuals throughout the world logged on at the same time.
Not only did you have to negotiate any number of strange objects
that could affect where you were, but conversation, to the extent
that the messages flashing across the screen might be considered
conversation, had no large-scale sense to them. Individuals who
recognized each other among the thousands present might page
each other or teleport somewhere for some gossip. Unless you had
such a friend-in-waiting, what happened on the screen made all the
sense of listening to every voice simultaneously at a convention
center, or at Grand Central Station. Some of my students found it
mesmerizing, like watching a Mardi gras parade. Others tried to

626
engage in conversation or follow conversations, and actually felt ill,
sort of nauseated. It was amusing, from an anthropological
standpoint, to see how inventive users were in creating alter-egos
for themselves, in gender-swapping experiments, and all the other
sorts of things that sociologist Sherry Turkel has described, but
there was no place for genuine, inviting, and meaning-producing
conversations of the sort we had come to revere in our seminars.
So, we had this idea that we might create our own, private
MOO-space, running on a campus server, just to see if, when
enjoining conversation among students who knew each other face-
to-face, and were committed to intellectual and personal integrity,
and satisfying conversation, we might be able to continue the
process into a virtual space. My student assistant did the heavy
lifting of translating our ideas into computer code, where we could
build rooms and seminar spaces, and informal spaces. We came up
with an idea for the seminar discussions that we thought would
help us to transfer our seminar skills into a real-time, MOO-space,

627
but to refine the computer code we needed more expertise, so we
solicited help from two on-campus computer gurus, both of whom
had a lot of experience in artificial spaces like MOOs. What we
asked for was a “talking stick.”
The talking stick was to be a virtual object, of the sort one
could program into a text-based MOO, and we thought it might be
a very useful bridge from the random wildness of typical MOO
experiences to a space compatible with our seminar. In essence, one
would enter the seminar room and login for a discussion. We
decided that the number of virtual chairs around a virtual table
might be limited to twelve, and once these chairs were taken then
the seminar was full for that evening. Others might still want to
come in and observe the discussion, but active participation would
be limited to twelve, taking our cue from our experience in face-to-
face discussions. In order for one to “speak,” or post a comment,
one had to first “pick up” the talking stick, which also meant that it
had to be free for use. The talking stick was free, meaning you
628
could pick it up and have the floor for a conversational comment,
when the previous speaker had “put down” the talking stick.
The attributes of the talking stick were all attempts to,
however clumsily, map good protocol of active listening and
respect for the individual that occurred in satisfying seminars,
through all sorts of awareness of personality, body language and
expression, and finally skillful moderation by a seminar leader. To
avoid the time lag involved in typing in one’s commentaries to the
topic or someone else’s comments, as opposed to verbal
conversation, we also thought that the “handle” of the talking stick
might be a kind of buffer, where conversants could type in
comments as they thought of them, and the comments would be
stored and queued up in order of entry, and released automatically
once one had picked up the talking stick.
We never did code our talking stick, which I’m sure
wouldn’t be too great a challenge to someone skilled in the art. We
did run a few seminar-type discussions in our own little MOO
(which we dubbed “Morphburg”) with varying degrees of success

629
and satisfaction. What I do remember most vividly, however, was a
discussion that my student assistant and I had with two computer
programmers whom we hired for short-term assistance and
consultation. When we described just what the object was that we
wanted to construct, the talking stick, and why this virtual object
would help us emulate a seminar discussion, one of the two (who
had a lot of experience playing in MOOs) asked, “Why would you
ever want to do such a thing? Everybody knows that when you are
in a MOO-space, and the text is scrolling by really fast, you don’t
worry about it. You just ignore everything, and you get good at
spotting your name, or alias, when it scrolls up, and that’s what you
pay attention to. That means somebody is trying to get your
attention. The rest of it is junk, so why pay attention?”
Despite this unsatisfying introduction to the realm of
computer-mediated communications, I am sure that there will be
major changes in both the technology and our uses of it that will
be potentially useful in enriching true community in the future. I
have little doubt that as the “bandwidth” of our computer-mediated

630
communications increases, as our modems give way to cable or
satellite links and processor speeds increase, these interactive
spaces will get increasingly more sophisticated, becoming
navigated much more by the sort of surrogate, multi-sensory
avatars that Neil Stephenson forecast some years ago in his cyber-
novel, Snow Crash. I am not a Luddite, and never have been. I enjoy
technology simply because I have always had, as part of my
personality, the affections of the gadgeteer. I find myself fascinated
with every advance in technology, simply because it can be done. I
also am interested in technology as a student of the human
condition, because many technologies so profoundly alter the
landscape of possibilities and “what is,” that I am intrigued by what
we as humans will become, or think, by the mere presence of
profound technologies.
I think that computer-mediated communications have great
possible implications for the human condition, but I am not sure
what they are yet. The problem to date is that we are using
existing technology, and building next-generation technologies, to
simply facilitate what we are already doing. The big dream of the
631
titans of networking is to make us infinitely more efficient
consumers of things and data. I find this depressing. This is not a
case similar to the laser being “a solution in search of a problem,”
nor of using a computer as a doorstop. This dream of electronic
market consumerism actually does use all of the bells and whistles
that microprocessors and fiber optics can deliver. A more
appropriate metaphor for this commercial dream is that the
technology has become a hypodermic needle, pumping us full of
surrogates to authentic living.
The simple utopian hope that once we could all talk
together, we would all somehow be even incrementally more
enlightened is not something I see as inevitable and something I
have seen precious little evidence for to date. Computers are
exceptionally good at handling information. We have taken that
entity, information, and at times done meaningful things with it,
but most often we simply multiply it because we can. We can
retrieve data, like the daily news, and send it on to the next person
(or nearly everyone) whom we feel needs to see it next, whether for
632
a business decision, or gossip masquerading as personal
connection, or just so much entertaining imagery. The simple fact
that each one of us can now become our own broadcast station to
the world, does not imply that meaning, transformation, or
wisdom, will somehow organize itself out of the noise.
Therefore, when I think of possible uses of such
communications actually helping our species become different
creatures, wiser and not merely with more information to access, I
am drawn, at least as a point of departure, toward the local. If we
have nothing meaningful to say, or to solicit from others, why
should we think that being able to do so anonymously and
potentially with untold millions, will be some quantum leap
forward in the evolution of the species? (I am thinking again of the
termites in a super-saturated environment.) The fact is that we
have built up a physical landscape, and modes of living, especially
in the last century that have made the art of conversation
increasingly more rare, more difficult to initiate and sustain.

633
What I am in favor of, and have done some work in for the
last few years, is the development of community-based,
conversational networks. Places in cyberspace where we can meet
in book clubs, where students can share with students, where
mentors might be available, where teachers and parents can meet.
These are architectures dedicated, first of all, to enabling us to
overcome our urban and suburban built landscapes of isolation and
suspicion. They invite conversation and personal responsibility, and
actively discourage anonymous and antisocial behavior. How? By
serving geographically local populations, who might inaugurate
their getting to know each other electronically and asynchronously
(to accommodate our various work schedules and other
obligations), but which draw such people to WANT to meet each
other face-to-face.
If we can succeed in surmounting the barriers of our built
landscapes and our constructed lives, we may very well be able to
reincorporate into our futures the most essential components of
true community that underpinned, through necessity of lifestyle at

634
the time, the qualities inherent in the pastoral ideal. I am not
saying that computer-mediated communications is the only way to
penetrate our cubicle-like and conversation-inhibiting walls
(physical and social); it is simply one of the truly beneficial
applications of a technology that is largely squandered on much
less meaningful tasks, and in the process that technology, through
our willingness to settle for life’s surrogates, has become our
master, demanding that we do more and more to keep it fed.
If we can succeed in bending our intentions toward the
creation of conversational communities, all sorts of other things
naturally flow out. I certainly think we will have the potential to
become much more welcoming of other cultures and world-views,
that we will be able to embrace and celebrate the richness of the
human experience since we are less fearful of holding on to our
own fragile world views. I am not implying that we will arrive at
the state where everyone is in intimate contact with everyone else
on the globe. That is ultimately possible so far as technological
infrastructure is concerned, but it doesn’t comport well with the
human psyche (without some radical alteration of the

635
psychological and physiological operation of the human mind, that
would not seem to be our destiny). We can only have meaningful
communication that is deep conversation, with so many people at a
time, and during a reasonable life span. However, if communities
themselves become conversant among themselves, it is not too
much to imagine that we will also develop meaningful modes of
communication within layers, among more complex social
structures: community to community, region to region, nation to
nation.
If we can succeed in creating conversational communities,
we might expect other developments as well. I had mentioned
earlier that it would be wonderful if adults, at regular intervals in
life and regardless of their occupation, were able to return to
learning communities for deep explorations and soul-satisfying
conversations. In a conversational community, where talking of
ideas with depth becomes the norm and the reward for living, one
might easily imagine that groups of adults might make use of
universities, or any public campuses, to pursue these conversations.

636
But one might easily imagine that it would be the participants
themselves who would design the courses of study and help run
them, rather than turning the whole matter over to a supposed
higher authority, in the figure of a professor of this or that.
I envision a politics of empathy and learning emerging
from a culture that embraces conversational communities, rather
than the politics of competition and siege warfare among groups
with immutable demands, which is the politics we currently endure,
where the “communal wisdom” amounts to no more than a head
count of ideologues or monied interests. A politics of empathy and
learning is radical, I know, but so much more life giving. I also
imagine school children being asked to participate in the process of
helping the community find itself, and its meaning, beyond the fact
that people just happen to be located in mutual proximity and tied
together by taxes and real estate value. Do we really want our
children to seek wisdom? Then they must see that we seek it as
well, and we are inviting them into the process, not to be our
economic equals, or our placeholders once we have reached the end

637
of mortality, but as new and different and wiser creatures than we
could become because that is their destiny.
Do we want our children to understand anything about
governments and societies and history? We say we do. Why not
have school projects, or class projects, where children go out in
teams and gather oral history interviews from the most senior
members of the community? Why not send them to the local
newspaper and find out the history of how their own community
evolved? Maybe put it on a website, but have the community hold it
up as something worthy and wonderful, and all about connecting
generations and finding meaning. Do you want new ideas for
developing downtown? Why not ask a group of local high school
students to do the initial study. They will need plenty of mentors
in city planning, in soliciting input through interviewing those
living in the affected areas, and in the economics of infrastructure.
Have these students know that they are being given a big
responsibility, that what they come up with most certainly will be
listened to by the rest of the city. And these students WILL rise to
638
that occasion, for it calls out the best in them and establishes that
they are already useful, not just after some indefinitely long
apprenticeship.
The ideas just keep multiplying once we have embraced
who we truly are, who we can be, once we attempt to reach out of
flatland altogether. Humanity has always been blessed with
visionaries from time to time, and their singular urging has always
been to awaken ourselves to the vibrant glory that is our existence.
To be truly awake is not so simple as a literal comparison to
physical sleep versus being physically awake. How do you know
when you are awake, as opposed to being asleep? Is it that you get
up and walk around, and do other things until it is time to go to
bed? Sleepwalkers do those things as well, and much of the
twentieth century can be seen as so much frenetic sleepwalking. On
the other hand, one cannot be certain that one is asleep if one is
dreaming. There are dreamers, lucid dreamers, who are so
intensely awake that it is nothing like the consciousness that we
often utilize as we sleepwalk our ways through our duties.

639
We need to awaken from our sleepwalking. We need to
awaken to our best dreams, our visions. This kind of dreaming is a
gift of being human, and we must not let that gift slip through our
benumbed fingers as they grasp instead for surrogates. We can
dream this way. We can envision beyond what is and out of
flatland. We can do this. Together.
Where there is no vision, the people perish. . . .
Proverbs 29:18
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Notes
Introduction
[p.5] Of the two epigrams, for the first (Gide) I am indebted to my

friend and colleague Les Adler, who used it as a lead-in for an essay
he recently wrote entitled “Uncommon Wisdom.” The second is
from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Harper and Row, 1972, p. 62e.
[p.8] It is worthy of note that the Harper’s Magazine article to

which I refer preceded a companion piece entitled, [On the Uses of
a Liberal Education] “As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless
Poor,” by Earl Shorris, Harper’s Magazine, Sept., 1997, 50-59. This
article has its moments of grandeur, to be sure. And the project
the author took up, to bring a powerful humanities education to a
group of the most desperate, in every sense of the word, of New
Yorkers is magnificent in its nobility. The article is worth anyone’s
reading. However, and this is understandable in its context, there
is an overarching tenor of vengeance. If one were to read only
these two articles as outlining the potentials of education in
extremis, along a single number line with one end right and the
other wrong, one is left seeing it in its most decadent, and
common, form as being an anaesthetic for apathetic youth who
already have their membership cards to privilege on the one end;
and as a kind of terrorist arsenal for the disciples of a latter-day
641
Spartacus, on the other end. I found myself depressed after each

article, feeling that invaluable human resources were being
dissipated in both cases.
[p.9] I was most impressed with William Wimsatt’s little missive

to his generation. Wimsatt had left college to become an
apprentice of life, traveling cheaply, with little more than his laptop
for recording his findings, seeking wisdom wherever he could find
it. It is easy to dismiss such a journey as nothing too far out of the
norm for an eighteen-year-old, but Wimsatt is not simply a
wandering bohemian, taking time off. He shows a great energy
and excitement for his potential to get to the real. And he has
concrete suggestions on method for others who might wish to try a
similar experiment, including the deep cultivation of significant
mentors, and expressing gratitude at every turn wherever one is
fortunate to find insights. He has all the enthusiasm we would
hope to find motivating youth, combined with a spiritual maturity
well beyond his years.
[p. 10] T.J. Jackson Lears’ book: No Place of Grace: antimodernism

and the transformation of American culture, 1880-1920, _____ press,
1981.
[p. 18] Edwin Abbott, Flatland: a romance of many dimensions,

Dover Publications, 1992. Philosopher Ken Wilber also uses the
metaphor of “flatland,” in his books A Brief History of Everything,
Shambhala Press, 1996; and The Marriage of Sense and Soul:
integrating science and religion, Random House, 1998. I have enjoyed
642
both these thoughtful books immensely, and Wilber’s courage in

deliberately arguing for both the reality of the spiritual dimension
as well as urging that we are at a time in human evolution that
begs for a synthesis of these different, interconnected, realms of
understanding, has helped me to be able to articulate the ideas in
this book.
I have found a wonderful companion to Wilber’s Marriage
of Sense and Soul in another recent book: Healing Emotions:
conversations with the Dalai Lama on mindfulness, emotions, and health,
edited by Daniel Goleman, Shambhala, 1997. This book is a record
of one of several conferences arranged between notable scientific
researchers in various fields and the Dalai Lama. A series of short
papers are given to all convened, and then a transcript of the
conversation of discovery and critical inquiry follows. The
intimations of direct spiritual knowledge and laboratory research
are fascinating, without torturing either side to say either more or
less than they actually do. The sense upon reading all these
transcripts is of openess, intelligence, wonder, and gratitude.
Sometimes the most telling instances are the parts of transcripts
which indicate that both able translators needed time for searching
discussion because the phrase or sense of meaning in the
reflections of the speaker had either no direct translation, or lost
much of the cultural implication even in translating liberally.
Wilber doesn’t mention Abbott in his invocations of the
“Flatland” metaphor, which at first surprised me as this was the
first and most immediate reference that came to my mind. Given
the remarkable depth of Wilber’s syntheses, it would not be the
least surprising if this image presented itself to him directly as the
643
most sensible analogue for the effect of the great reducing agent of
pure empiricism as it translates all experience by projecting it onto
the metaphysical equivalent of a two-dimensional grid.
I first happened upon Abbott’s fable many years ago when
going through a public library educational film collection and
found an animated, 16mm film of the story (I believe it was
produced in 1970). The voice of A. Square was that of a young
Dudley Moore, and the voice of the Sphere was wonderfully
pompous. There is only one significant deviation between the film
and the original. In the written form, when A.Square makes the
next obvious transcendental leap of expecting that there must be
even higher dimensionalities, after having seen that there were
actually three dimensions and not only his two-dimensional
flatland, Sphere finally relents that he may perhaps be able to learn
from his own student, and the two take off on a journey of many
dimensions. In the film, Sphere remains indignant and
schoolmasterly. He become angry with Square for even proposing
such nonesense, for “there are only three dimensions.”
This is a marvelous little instance where, no matter what
our reality, and however superior to other’s limited perspective we
may consider it, the real wisdom comes in being able to perceive
transcendence from one’s own given reality at all, not to simply
hold a new reality to be the natural and absolute limit. In the film,
Sphere never gets the wisdom that he catalyzed in his student, and
at that occasion casts him back down into Flatland in a fit of pique,
considering Square an ingrate.
644
Notes: Part I On Gratitude, the breath of envisioning
Chapter 1: Childhood and the intimations of gratitude
[p.26] For a brief overview of the major effort to categorize and

elaborate personal developmental stages on might turn to Erik H.
Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed, Norton, 1985.
[p. 33-35] In the discussion of fundamental qualities and

qualtities I chose to use classical physics both because of
familiarity for me (of quickly paring it down to an interactive
exercise in a classroom setting) and for the reader in calling on
concepts that are common to everyday life. All systems of
explanation and description have such concepts, and they are the
very essence of what must be illuminated to understand how our
humanness understands its existence. Because the physics of
Newton has real world (common, human scale) application, it is a
natural to opening up such an exercise. In the western tradition
the hallmark of any system of inquiry is that its elaborations
follow coherently from its fundamental propositions, and an
example of the power of such methodology might be Euclidean
geometry.
We often think of points, lines, straightness and curvature

as being fundamental quantities in Euclidean geometry, but these
are secondary constructs resting on the most fundamental
quantities before one can construct a system of geometry. The
645
most fundamental properties defy description in any simpler

language and must simply be held to exist and to be
comprehensible to any other sentient being. Those are that, 1)
there is such a thing as space, or extension, that can be said to exist
between objects, real or representational, and 2) there is such a
thing as location within space. These seem to be so obvious that,
not only does it seem silly to need to assert their existence, but the
very act of doing so leaves one reeling. Once these are established,
then points, lines, angles, curves, projections, and all the rest make
coherent and even practical sense.
I had a bumper sticker years ago that said “Physics is Good
for You.” Bumper stickers are hardly the most reliable sources for
deep meaning, but in this off-handed little professional boosterism,
there is actually a tradition that is millenia-old. In the Middle
Ages, when formal western universities were founded, the core
curriculum consisted of the quadrivium and trivium, seven
subjects in all considered absolutely essential for one to be
considered educated, and geometry was one of those core
endeavors. Why? Because its rigorous logic and paring away of
all higher presumption to its indivisible root assumptions was
considered an essential tempering of the intellect. Not a
tempering of the sort that “if it was good enough for me, it’s good
enough for you.” though one can never assume that such human
foibles were not as well part of the authority of the “schoomen.”
Rather it tempers the mind to find itself in accord with the
ultimate reason of the world as it is, not deluded by the mere
multiplication of exceptions, side-cases, or the multiplication of
words.
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Another one of the seven essential disciplines was music!

And again, this was not, at least in its ideal evocation, to be studied
so that one would show a cultural sophistication and be able have
interesting dinner conversation. Rather, the Greeks, including
Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, had discerned an elegant
mathematical relationship between consonant tones and dissonant
ones. Those combinations of notes that were pleasing to the ear
(e.g., octaves, major thirds and fifths) when played together also
arose from basic arithmetic relationships on the instrument on
which they were sounded, such as the length of the string on a
lyre, or the resonant length of a pipe or flute. They further
concluded that the motion of the celestial bodies would also have
similar ratios in their periods and thus produce the music of the
spheres, and that such music, imperceptible to the human ear, was
exquisitely beautiful. Thus, a study of music was yet another
avenue by which a student could attune his inward spirit with
perfection. These were intimations of the perfection of the
cosmos, and thus intimations of the imperfect imprint we and the
terrestrial world bore of our ultimate source of existence. Again,
the basic attitude was not that we could master the physical world
or improve upon it, but that perfection existed and we might hope
to find its traces and, in the process, begin to sanctify ourselves.
And since, in this ancient world view, the cosmos was
fundamentally a matter of geometry and proportion, one was in
touch with the spiritual, permanent, and undefilable. In my own
historical investigations I have found a similar sentiment prevalent
in the arena of experimental physics in the United States during
the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. The
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renowned researchers of the day were convinced that there was

something essentially moral and ethical, something purifying to
the baser human instincts, of learning how to read nature aright
through the discipline of the experimental laboratory.
[p. 38] I mention the commonality of fundamental qualities and

quantities in all spiritual wisdom paths in their early formulations,
which I discuss in greater detail in chapter 3. Many others have
taken up the challenge of tracing these connections, through
practices that survive to this day in formal religions that find their
roots in ancient practice. However, the best single introduction of
which I am aware is Lex Hixon’s Coming Home:the experience of
enlightenment in sacred traditions, Larson Publications, 1995.
Hixson’s sweeping treatise is not merely an academic exercise in
finding concordances of doctrines. Rather, it is also a firsthand
account of the practices and experiences that are the generative
force behind these traditions.
[pp. 38-40] Besides Camus’ The Stranger, another favorite work of

mine to get at the same idea of the tenuousness of the social
construction of our realities is the play “The Balcony,” by Jean
Genet. It concerns a cast of characters, representing various
archetypical stations in civilized society sequestered away in a most
surreal bordello, while a real shooting-war threatens to bring down
the rest of society outside the walls of the bordello. The function
of the bordello, rather than selling sex-as-love for money, is
equally a prostitution of authentic life. Here the characters are
able to act out their cherished, and purpose-giving roles as they
648
would be played out in larger society, if not for the war. At one
point, a character playing out the role of a judge, becomes
frightened that the prostitute is not fully willing to play her role of
defendant, and tells her, in so many words, that without her
acquiecence in her role, he, as magistrate, would cease to exist.
[pp. 42-43] For an account of the episode see Nancy Uber-

Kellogg, “Moments of Bafflement, Impasse, and Mutuality: Angle
composition instructor’s stories of teaching Native American
students,” doctoral dissertation, Purdue University, West Lafayette,
IN, 1998.
Notes: Ch. 2 “Why We Have Forgotten Gratitude: a brief

historical excursion”
[p. 46] John Kasson’s first book, Civilizing the Machine: technology
and republican values in America, 1776-1900, Penguin, 1977, has long
been a favorite of mine. This little book actually brings alive
the dynamics of the
collision between the emerging industrial state and some of the
most significant thinkers of the time on the meaning of life, work,
virtue, community, democracy, and the power not just of economic
forces of production but the power of symbols once they become
facts on the ground. This heady mixture of possibilities and
threats, as they were unfolding, is presented with elegance and the
sense of being “close to the ground,” as anthropologist Clifford
Geertz recommended. I don’t think this little book got the
649
attention it deserved, although it was well-received. On the other

hand, Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden: technology and the
pastoral ideal in America, Oxford, 1964, succeeded more in its place
in the historical canon. This is also a fine study, and clearly and
passionately evokes the fundamental distinctions between the
tonalities of city, farm, and wilderness during the nineteenth
century. But I also think that Marx’s book, painting a different
picture of industrialisation much more attuned to the more more
fearful of the pronouncements of the transcendentalist literary
figures, simply arrived at the right time in its publishing, with the
literati already primed to dismiss the technological world as
malignant.
[p. 48] I just make a glancing mention of the historical arrival of

what we would call the modern disposition toward investigating
and codifying the material world, also known as the Scientific
Revolution, and its triumph over Renaissance Naturalism. Most
readers will have encountered the former phrase but may be
unfamiliar with the latter. As in all world-changing revolutions,
the encounter between these two world-views is extraordinarily
rich and very illuminative of the ways it is possible to think about
reality and humanity’s significance. The single best source on the
dimensions of this epoch can be found in the collection of
scholarly essays, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance,
Brian Vickers, ed., Cambridge Univ., 1984.
Just a few general observations may entice the reader to
explore further. The Renaissance Naturalists, whose purview
included what we call the alchemical pursuits, were inheritors of
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the Platonic notions of embedded qualities in the gross terrestrial

world, hinting of a perfect order beyond. However, distinct from
the purely mental contemplation of orders and symmetries, they
also held that an intimate knowledge of deep reality could also
produce the ability to evoke change in the physical world. One
might say that they were engineers, of a sort.
There are several significant differences between the
Naturalists and anything we might construe as modern applied
science. First is the heavy reliance on metaphor to deduce order.
(For example, if one wished to strengthen one’s brain you might
take to eating walnuts, since walnuts look, on the inside, somewhat
like brains in miniature!) Secondly, you can’t force nature to do
anything “unnatural,” that is, you can only configure matter so as
to make apparent qualities inherent in the matter itself. These first
two principles can actually be understood, in the language of the
day, as the search for “sympathies,” and “antipathies” in nature.
Thirdly, the experimenter was absolutely part and parcel of the
object of the experiment. If one were to publish instructions for
an alchemical “recipe,” for example, and someone else were to
replicate those instructions with a null result, it was perfectly
reasonable to conclude that the second individual did not possess
the necessary spiritual virtues to persuade nature to cooperate.
Further complicating the collision of the Naturalists and
Modernists is the fact that many of the celebrated heroes of the
Scientific Revolution were themselves suffused with inclinations
and interpretations from the Naturalists. The most notable of
these was Newton himself, who, while producing the masterpieces
of early empirical and theoretical science (The Principia and
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Optiks), was also a devoted alchemist and numerologist.
[pp. 49] The quote from Taylor is found in F.W.Taylor, The

Principles of Scientific Management, Norton, 1967,pp. 142-44.
[p. 49-50] See Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887,

Signet, 1960. The information on the Bellamy Clubs, etc., are from
this edition’s forward, by Erich Fromm. For the best study of the
history and reception of visions like Bellamy’s during this period,
see Howard P. Segal’s Technological Utopianism in American Culture,
Univ. Chicago, 1985.
[pp. 50-52] In addition to the Richard Hofstadter monograph

referred to in the text (The Age of Reform, Vintage, 1955) I would
like to mention just a few of my favorites. An excellent source of
primary material from principal actors on the national stage is
Richard Hofstadter’s (ed.) The Progressive Movement, 1900-1915,
Simon and Schuster, 1963, Touchstone, 1986. My favorite source
for intimate detail of both immigrant experience, and the lives of
other disenfranchised persons is a collection of autobiographical
vignettes first published as a series in the Independent, between
1902 and 1911. It was recently published as The Life Stories of
Undistinguished Americans, as told by themselves, Hamilton Holt, ed.,
Routledge, 1990. For a panoramic view of the sheer velocity and
divergent paths of change on all social fronts, and the attempts to
reign these into something coherent see Robert H. Wiebe, The
Search for Order, 1877-1920, Hill and Wang, 1987. For a powerful
study of the experience of the African-American in the south, Joel
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Williamson, A Rage for Order: black-white relations in the American

south since emancipation, Oxford, 1986. Roy Rosenzweig’s Eight
Hours for What We Will: workers and leisure in an industrial city,
1870-1920, Cambridge, 1983, explores the evolution of manual
industrial labor as a way of life amalgamating disparate cultures,
and the institutionalization of (in the words of Daniel Boorstin)
the fungibility of timed-labor, and its negotiated payoff of leisure
and amusement. One slice of the response of more privilged
segments of society to the culture is explored by Lewis A.
Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York nightlife and the transformation of
American culture, 1890-1930, Univ. Chicago, 1981. Three significant
studies of the precursor conditions to the progressive era are: Alan
Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America: culture and society in the
Gilded Age, Hill and Wang, 1982; Burton J. Bledstein’s The Culture
of Professionalism: the middle class and the development of higher
education in America, Norton, 1978; and The Organization of
Knowledge in America, 1860-1920, Alexandra Oleson and John Voss,
eds, _______ press, 1979. And for the interaction between
business, society, and technology I recommend two more studies:
David F. Noble’s America by Design: science, technology, and the rise of
corporate capitalism, Oxford, 1979; and Thomas P. Hughes’ American
Genesis: a century of invention and technological enthusiasm,
1870-1970, Penguin, 1989. My mention of the importance of the
early work of the National Bureau of Standards as a model and
signifier for the resolution of the forces at play in these decades is
based upon my own doctoral dissertation: “Gauging the Nation:
Samuel Wesley Stratton and the invention of the National Bureau
of Standards,” Nelson R. Kellogg, Ph.D., 1991, The Johns Hopkins
653
University, available through University Microfilms International,

order number 9216584. For a history of the eugenics movement,
see In the Name of Eugenics: genetics and the uses of human heredity,
by Daniel J. Kevles, University of California Press, 1986. And
finally, for sheer comprehensiveness, as well as ingenious synthesis
from many other historians, few single volumes are more
informative than Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Americans: the democratic
experience, Vintage, 1974.
[p. 52] There are other historical essays where the author finds a
unifying thread similar to mine, though usually not in precisely the
same words or with the anonymous engineer, who at that time was
fighting a battle simply to be considered as a culturally-recognized
professional, as was the case with law and medicine. For an essay
that finds the progressive theme to be an overarching optimism for
design solutions to any problems, see John Chynoweth Burnham’s
essay, “Psychiatry, Psychology, and the Progressive Movement,” in
The National Temper: readings in American history, L.W. Levine and
R. Middlekauf, eds., ______ press, 1968. However, one historian of
technology, Edwin T. Layton,
has done more than any other in describing the patterns of
consonance and dissonance between the evolution of the
engineering professions and the larger culture in the decades
around the turn of the century in his classic study, The Revolt of
the Engineers: social responsibility and the American engineering
profession, Johns Hopkins, 1986.
Other studies demonstrate the mutual generativity of
specialties coming out of this mindset, and their locations in this
654
period. See, for example, Disenchanted Realists: political science and

the American crisis, 1884-1984, By Raymond Seidelman and Edward
Harpham, State University of New York Press, 1985. As the social
sciences strove to become more and more empirical, following the
lead of respectability well-established in the physical sciences, they
also had to set up professional subcultures, diverging in an effort to
establish independent authority (see “Boundary maintenance in
American sociology:limitations to acdemic ‘professionalization’,” by
Henrika Kuklick, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16
(1980), pp. 201-219.)
[p. 52] Among the few engineers known to the larger public were
Charles Kettering of General Motors, and Charles Proteus
Steinmetz, the wizard of General Electric.
[pp. 53-57] The material here is drawn from Henry Adams’, The
Education of Henry Adams: an autobiography, Houghton Mifflin,
chapters 25 and 34.
[p. 58] Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the

Enlightenment in France, Harvard, 1968. This book is a fascinating
study of the wild passions and enthusiasms catalyzed by Franz
Anton Mesmer from the time he arrived in Paris in 1778 through
the French Revolution. What is so powerful about this early work
of Darnton’s is that it captures the social and cultural chaos of
both the wealthy patrons of the salons as well as the frustrations of
a group of young radicals who would be central to the political
uprisings. And Mesmer, having found middling interest in his
655
homeland, appeared on the scene with his near-messianic at the

perfect nexus to catalyze the imaginings of both groups. The
young Turks included those of middling intellect and not born to
privilege, who, colluding with the bored rich through this mixture
of parlor demonstrations and the promised assurance of
supernatural energy and what it portended for its adherents,
proved a volatile mixture.
One must avoid the literalisms of trying to impose one
historical episode on another, expecting to see replications in
detail, much less using such episodes to prognosticate or write
policy. However, it is even more wasteful (and much less fun) to
avoid drawing any patterns of recapitulation in human affairs. And
this little book continuously calls the reader to see the profound
echoes in this slice of fin de sciecle France and the cultural
gyrations of the United States from the 1960s to this day in
producing every possible stripe of guru, who has succeeded in
drawing especially members of the economically privileged into
one scheme of utopia-on-earth after another.
[pp. 58-59] For an examination of Mary Shelly’s influences, both

from the popular knowledge of Galvani’s work, as well as possibly
from her husband’s (Percy Shelly) own dabblings in electrical
experiments, see Maurice Hindle’s introduction to Frankenstein, or
the Modern Prometheus, Penguin, 1985. For a wonderful exegesis on
the influence of mill technology on cultural expectation of work
and the patterns of society, see Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval
Machine, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976.
656
[pp. 58-60] I still find the work of Jacques Ellul, in The

Technological Society, Vintage, 1964, to be among the most
significant and penetrating analyses of our time. Among other
contributions to the understanding of the human condition, Ellul
insists that we not succumb to the easy labelling of technology as
machines, however intricate. The machines themselves are tools.
The heart of technology stems from the underlying ability of
humans to invent techniques. Thus, the plow is an instrument for
carrying out the technology (technique) of agriculture. Keeping
accounts in lists of debits and credits is technique and the essential
technology itself, regardless of whether one keeps such reckoning
by moving beads, writing in a ledger, or entering the data into a
spreadsheet. This powerful insight allows us, in our assessment of
what we are doing and becoming, to ask the most fundamental
questions of technique, human activity, and human values, rather
than indulging in the useless reifying of a particular device as boon
or bane. Ellul also examines in great length the basic notion that
we become our techniques in the most fundamental ways.
To illuminate the power of this more comprehensive vision
of the meaning of technology and the fact that it is a most
profound human tendency throughout history, I sometimes like to
use the example of the invention of money and its evolution with
my students. As a revolutionary new technique, the invention of a
freely translatable symbol and fungible symbol of work, worth,
and commodity, few, if any, technologies have had a more profound
effect on civilization than the invention of money. See the
excellent article by Heather Pringle, “The Cradle of Cash,” in
Discover Magazine, October, 1998. The accompanying articles in
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this theme-dedicated issue include the potentially profound effects

attending the future of money, including the political and
psychological aspects of such things as the introduction of the
“euro” in the next few years, and the implications of a cashless
society.
A contemporary reevaluation of the power of the physical
presence of technologies in the landscape, both real and imaginal,
is Langdon Winner’s extraordinary book, The Whale and the
Reactor: a search for limits in an age of high technology, University of
Chicago, 1986. In connection with this discussion, see especially
the first two chapters, “Technology as Forms of Life,” and “Do
Artifacts Have Politics?”.
[pp. 61-63] The single most comprehensive work on the history of

experimental psychology is Robert A. Boakes, From Darwin to
Behaviourism, Univ. Sussex, 1984. Supplementally, I reviewed the
American professional journals (e.g. Journal of General Psychology,
Psychological Review) covering the period discussed to get a sense of
the rise of the empiricist-behaviorist, and the professional
marginalization of figures such as E.C. Tolman. An excellent
historical work on the collision of these two major themes in
American academic psychology, including the toe-to-toe warfare
between Watson and representatives of traditional (pre-
behaviorist) psychology (notably William McDougall of Harvard,
see Purposive Explanation in Psychology by Margaret A. Boden,
Harvard Univ. Press, 1972.
[p.63-64] It is fascinating that the rise of the social sciences, as

658
would be recognized today in their academic clothing, erupted at

the same time as these fundamental changes in every area of living
and ascertaining personal and social meaning were accelerating.
One of the most illuminating documents to come out of the early
twentieth century, therefore, is the landmark study of every aspect
of life in a particular city (Muncie, Indiana), that is overflowing
with insights obtained from the townspeople themselves of what
they thought their personal and community lives were about, and
what fundamental assumptions were undergoing radical change.
Middletown: a study in modern American culture, by Robert S. Lynd
and Helen Merrel Lynd, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929.
[pp. 64-65] For a lyrical tour of American life in this period I

would again refer Boorstin’s The Americans: the democratic experience,
op.cit. For an examination of the methods, themes, and resonances
between the engineers of the new consumerism and their public’s
response to purchase image and character, see Roland Marchand’s
Advertising the American Dream: making way for modernity,
1920-1940, University of California Press, 1985.
Chapter 3: Beyond childhood: cultivating an even deeper gratitude
[p. 70] There are not many works, outside of the fantasy and
science fiction genres, which address the delight that some find in
gadgets or mechanisms not because of what they can accomplish
as labor-saving devices, but simply because of an inner fascination
with devices. Over the years I have considered this and have only a
few responses as to why this is so. First of all, the inveterate
659
tinkerer may be of a kind not often given to written disquisitions

on the subject. Most often, their text is the device itself, not
commentary on it. Secondly, as C.P.Snow noted years ago in his
essay “Two Cultures,” it has long been a conceit of the literary
classes to take some measure of pride in not knowing anything
about the sciences, and especially applied science or engineering,
while expecting anyone properly educated to have a certain fluency
in the history of the expressive arts. I tried to bridge this gap
myself with an essay I wrote but never published, entitled “The
Garden in the Machine,” which was a deliberate inversion of Leo
Marx’ book on industrialism and pastoralism, The Machine in the
Garden.
Still, there are a few which go fairly directly at the aesthetic
of the machine itself. In the past, when I have wanted students to
get a feel for the love of the device I would have them read Tracy
Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, Avon Books, 1982. I have
tried Samuel C. Florman’s The Existential Pleasures of
Engineering, St Martin’s Press, 1976, with less success. Florman
does have some good chapters, especially chapter 10, “Look long on
an engine. It is sweet to the eyes.” But he also tends to get more
than a little stentorian at times, and that wears thin. For an
examination of the types (using biographical vignettes and
historical episodes) who have been drawn to mechanical
innovations, I still enjoy the rather dated Men, Machines, and
Modern Times by Elting Morison, MIT Press, 1966.
For the passion evinced through a single life devoted to a
single device, I quite enjoy Dava Sobel’s Longitude: the true story of
a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time,
660
Penguin, 1995. And finally I was most pleasantly surprised just

recently by another monograph. My own passions, as mentioned
in the text, had involved real devices, whether mechanical,
electrical or electronic, and that had very much to do with the
physicality of the device. While I had to learn a little computer
programming in college, I never got bitten by it, and for those who
were so taken by writing code, their passion seemed to me utterly
alien and I couldn’t imagine it having any drive or aesthetic
remotely related to what I felt for gadgets and instruments. That
changed when I recently read, and was taken over by Ellen
Ullman’s Close to the Machine: technophilia and its discontents, City
Lights Books, 1997.
[pp. 71-72] The comment of Daniel Boorstin is the best I can do

at recalling what he literally said during a short television
interview. His remarks stuck in my mind, but that is all.
[pp. 73-74] The reader must forgive me if I don’t elaborate all the
details of my spiritual journey, and the doctrines that proved so
unsettling. First of all, that could easily be the subject of a book
by itself if I was of a mind to write it. If I feel so inspired in the
future I may do so, but that is not at all my present inclination.
Further, I have no battle to wage against any religion, organized or
disorganized. I have read too much that is precious and timeless by
those who hold to one tradition or another to dismiss a particular
religion as a valid means for apprehending the transcendent.
Interestingly enough (to me at least) is that I can remember
what book I was reading when I first realized that my own
661
attempts to harmonize my religious and academic sensibilities

would not hold, and I don’t think it is a book that has ever been
blacklisted by any church. It was Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Copernican
Revolution: planetary astronomy in the development of Western thought,
Harvard, 1957.
[pp. 74-75] It is nice to be able to have fun with Pascal’s wager, but
I don’t want to be unfair to the seventeenth century mathematician.
If anyone ever worried more about piety, duty to God, and every
sort of metaphysical question and agonizing guilt that could visit
an individual, not many could surpass Blaise Pascal. And if I see
the wager as a poke in the eye to sanctimonius preaching, that
certainly wasn’t Pascal himself was working through. (Pascal,
Pensees, Penguin, translation 1966. “The wager,” pp. 149-155.)
[p. 78] The essays on the failures of education is itself an industry

of commentary. I hope the reader will not be disappointed if I
don’t cite a single one. I try not to keep that stuff around the
house.
[p. 79] Pierre Duhem, To Save the Phenomena: an essay on the idea of
physical theory from Plato to Galileo (first published in 1908),
University of Chicago, 1985.
[pp. 79-81] See Leviathan and the Air Pump, Hobbes, Boyle, and the
Experimental Life, by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Princeton
University Press, 1985, for historical insight into just how
profound was the change of evidence for insight into physical
662
reality, from Aristotle’s injunction to trust eyesight above all the

senses to the translation of phenomena unseen to the naked eye by
instrumentation. To understand better just how far this
interposition of elaborate and subtle instrumentation and
interpretation has moved in twentieth century physics, see Peter
Gallison’s How Experiments End, University of Chicago Press,
1987. For a theoretical examination of the socio-cultural fabric of
understanding in modern scientific networks, see Bruno Latour
and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: the construction of scientific facts,
Princeton University Press, 1987.
[pp. 81] The significance of primary experience can be found in all

guides for meditative practice. But for a cross-cultural analysis of
this elemental quality see, Shamanism: an expanded view of reality,
Shirley Nicholson, ed., Theosophical Publishing, 1987. For a more
intimate, and for me compelling, journey, I again recommend Lex
Hixon’s Coming Home: the experience of enlightenment in sacred
traditions, op. cit. There is another account of the collisions of
perceptions of lived realities that I must recommend, and that it
the autobiographical account of Malidoma Patrice Some, Of Water
and the Spirit: ritual, magic, and initiation in the life of an African
Shaman, Arkana (Penguin), 1995. I know of no other account like
it, nor of any other life experience like his, and to attempt to
summarize it would be to diminish it.
[pp. 84-86] The field of evolutionary psychology (and

evolutionary philosophy) is a recent synthesis of several disciplines
that has recently gotten a lot of attention and has produced some
663
fascinating and provocative studies by scholars like Robert Wright

and Patricia Churchland. It is indeed fascinating to see the
correlates between species survival and attributes like
communality, socialbility, and even selective sacrifice. Might such
an explanation provide essential insights of where we, historical
and prehistorical human society, developed our systems of ethics
and government, to include such things as guidelines for sexual
behavior and integrity, both their prescriptive and proscriptive
aspects? Sure. Why not?
But explaining mechanisms does not mean one has
explained away other essences that attend our behaviors and
beliefs, or that there is another reality, out of flatland, of which
behavioral manifestations are the traces. Of course we have had to
adapt to our ecologies. To posit that we haven’t so adapted would
be, well, unnatural! I think it quite possible to imagine that if we
evolved on a planet where, say, the gravitational constant were just
a bit different than it is, perhaps musical harmonies would be quite
different and the experiments of visual artists might have taken
turns otherwise unavailable. That doesn’t explain away the
transcendence of the arts. Furthermore, it is mere description. I
can’t run the experiment of tweaking gravity and watching for the
evolution of cultural forms. Neither can one run the experiment of
alternative worlds in evolutionary psychology as anything more
than a computer fantasy game.
[pp. 92-93] The Essential C.S. Lewis, Lyle W. Dorsett, ed., 1988,
Collier Books, pp. 23-29. Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer: an
approach to life in fullness, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Paulist Press,
664
1984, ch.2, “Surprise and Gratefulness.” The citation from Eugene

Ionesco is one I located some time ago, and used it as an epigram
for my unpublished essay, “The Garden in the Machine,” mentioned
above. Alas, I have lost the original.
For evocations of gratitude by mystical poets through time
and across cultures, I would recommend the very lovely collection,
The Enlightened Heart: an anthology of sacred poetry, Stephen
Mitchell, ed., HarperPerrenial, 1993. I would also recommend
Viktor E. Frankl’s classic, Man’s Search for Meaning (1939), Simon
and Schuster, 1963. This book, and there are many others that
work in this theme, finds gratitude and purpose even in the most
horrific of human experience. I have also greatly appreciated the
graceful and inviting book on this subject by Thomas Moore, The
Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, HarperPerrenial, 1996.
Notes: Chapter 4: Power of Surrogates
[pp. 96-98] The strangest, most bizarre example I have ever heard
about the reduction of anything to dollar-value came to me by way
of my good friend, Kendall Haven. Over the years Ken has worn
many hats, and is currently a professional storyteller and writer.
However, in the 1970s he was a scientist for the Department of
Energy, Lawrence-Berkeley Labs. Specifically, he worked as an
environmental scientist in LBL’s Energy and Environment
Division, and was the regional studies group leader when he left.
Among the sorts of things he and his colleagues did was to make
environmental assessments of proposed projects, such as a power
station, in the California Coastal area. We are all used to the idea
665
of environmental impact statements being required for all sorts of

things these days, ranging from pollution and its effects of human
populations and other layers of the biosphere. However, beginning
in the early 1970s, these studies, at least at the DOE, even included
more difficult concepts, such as the aesthetic changes to the
landscape incurred by certain contruction projects. The northern
California coast is one of the most magnificently beautiful areas on
earth, so one might be very glad that such considerations were
included such reports, but how did they do this?
Ken’s group used rubrics developed by the Bureau of Land
Management, beginning in 1972, and which became further
codified with the passage of the Coastal Zone Management Act in
1974. The first unit of measurement they used in assessing the
aesthetic value of a landscape-altering proposal was called the
“Recreation Day.” This is a dollar value assigned to the daily useage
of a portion of the landscape for recreation (camping, sightseeing,
etc.) Soon other units were added to the spreadsheet, including the
value to an individual for a specific amount of time, called the
“Recreator Day.” Of course, when considering this, one must
account for the aesthetic differences an individual may attribute to
different natural landscapes, so they then had to add in another
factor called “Viewshed,” and of course, “Viewshed Assessments.”
All of these had to be assigned a dollar value. How do you put a
dollar value on these increasingly baroque categories? Well, you
couldn’t just assign one by fiat, that would defy the basic premises
of good social engineering. These dollar values were obtained by
doing surveys, asking people how much, in dollars, these aesthetics
were worth, and then weighting and amalgamating the results.
666
And the process went even further than this, since someone
living right there at the proposed site would have a very different
idea than others in the population. Ultimately, then, the guidelines
for the worth of a project versus its aesthetic (and we aren’t even
talking about the biological impact) should include others. These
data included things called “Opportunity Costs,” and were again
obtained by sampling questionaires. For instance, if one were
considering a project that might affect the complexion of the
Grand Canyon, as an example, the actual project may be planned
far downstream from where its impact might be felt. In fact, it
might even be felt on the east coast! How? Well, you might
sample the opinion of people in New York who have never been to
the Grand Canyon, and might not ever go. However, one must
consider that a New Yorker would at least have in their minds that
at some time in life, they would have the “option to go.” Therefore,
you would do some sampling asking what dollar value a New
Yorker places on the possible aesthetic value they would place on
the Grand Canyon, by virtue of the fact that they may choose to
visit the place at some time.
The process seems not just a shaky proposition, but
positively surreal. But this is the only way one can make decisions
from an empirical, seemingly dispassionate standpoint. When we
turn over our difficult choices to panels of experts, a long and
engrained tradition in this country, they have no choice but to
reduce all variables to some kind of a common denominator, and it
speaks volumes about our culture that the only one we can locate is
money.
It is also remarkable that among laissez faire economists
667
these sorts of translations are postulated as obvious laws with

more insistence than ever before, and that any diversion from the
principle of the “dollar as common denominator,” will not only get
our society into serious trouble, but it will catapult us into the very
worst of Dark Ages-Part II. One example can be found in Steven
Landsburg’s The Armchair Economist: economics and everyday life,
Free Press, 1993. Chapter 24 is titled “Why I Am Not an
Environmentalist: the science of economics versus the religion of
ecology,” and in it he decries the catechisms his preschool daughter
had to endure about recycling and care for the earth as the most
benighted form of forced religious doctrine, for which he, as father,
was constrained regularly to provide the deprgramming. “The
naive environmentalism of my daughter’s preschool is a force-fed
potpourri of myth, superstition, and ritual that has much in
common with the least reputable varieties of religious
Fundamentalism. The antidote to bad religion is good science.
The antidote to astrology is the scientific method, the antidote to
naive creationism is evolutionary biology, and the antidote to naive
environmentalism is economics. Economics is the science of
competing preferences. Environmentalism goes beyond science
when it elevates matters of preference to matters of morality. (pp.
223-24 (italics in original)
[p.99] “Metaphors matter”--This is a most important concept,

namely
the ways in which we comparitively value all sorts of
incommensurable things: e.g., money; satisfaction; progress; the
psychic diversions of mere change and motion as good in and of
668
themselves; professional titles as an indication of success and

significance; belonging to a group of fellow believers as an
indication of our correctness of vision; etc. And the essential tool
in these incommensurate comparisons, and their ultimate
reduction, often, to money, are metaphoric intermediaries. John
Hopkins historian JoAnne Brown has recently finished a book
“Matters of Life and Death: Political Hygiene and Historical
Memory in the United States, 1865-1945,” (not yet published), in
which she examines the preeminence of the metaphors used to
mobilize public sentiment, including its manifold distortions that
tap into other extant sentiments of a popular culture of the times,
and the extraordinary fluidity that these metaphors have in
adapting themselves to seemingly distinct urges of widely
divergent groups with their own agendas. See “Why Metaphor
Matters,” an interview with Professor Brown by Dale Keiger in
Johns Hopkins Magazine, February, 1998.
Another interesting tidbit I recently ran across was a book
review titled, “The High Priest of Hype,” by Marilyn Harris in
Business Week, August 17, 1998. She is reviewing the book, The
Father of Spin: Edward Berneys and the Birth of Public Relations, by
Larry Tye, Crown, 1998. Harris finds significant shortfalls in the
execution of this book in the author’s inability to synthesize the
data in search of support for his purported theme, which are stated
as using Bernay’s life “‘as a prism to understand the evolution of
the craft of public relations andhow it came to play such a critical--
and sometimes insidious--role in American life.’” If, as Harris
maintains, Tye doesn’t answer this question, there was one other
quote from the book that caught my attention. Bernay’s was a
669
nephew of Sigmund Freud, and a “contemporary observer

observed that while Freud ‘is interested in releasing (and directing)
the pent-up libido of the individual, his American nephew is
engaged in releasing (and directing) the suppressed desires of the
crowd.’”
Another example that has recently made a great impression
upon me (out of many possible) illustrating the ability to enlist and
mutate one set of desires into something completely different and
to great effect. The recent excellent study of millenialisms
through histories and across cultures, The End of Time: faith and
fear in the shadow of the millenium, by Damian Thompson,
University of New England Press, 1996, abounds with such
examples. One portion of the study that I found breathtaking is
the chapter “Seoul: The Apocaplyptic City.” The amazing growth
of fundamentalist Christianity in Seoul is analyzed in detail, but
especially through the particulars of the dogma which melds
together such seeming incompatibilities as “end time;” predictions
of the golden epoch centering in South Korea; an unbriddled
enthusiasm for participation in the global marketplace; and
prophecies of the rapidly approaching technological and material-
wealth dominance of South Korea over Japan!
Of course there are other truly grand metaphors to be
found in cultural history, and I have always found the evolution of
the metaphors of time to be always wonderful for students to
contemplate, and in this connection I am fond of Edward T. Hall’s
The Dance of Life: the other dimension of time, Anchor Press/
Doubleday, 1984; and David S. Landes’ Revolution in Time: clocks and
the making of the modern world, Harvard University Press, 1983.
670
Other monographs have addressed the potent symbolisms of

projective military power (e.g., Carlo Cipolla’s, Guns, Sails, and
Empires, Sunflower Univ. Press, 1985); architectures (e.g. Alan
Trachtenberg’s Brooklyn Bridge: fact and symbol, University of
Chicago, 1979, and David P. Billington’s The Tower and the Bridge,
Princeton University Press, 1985); the history of space exploration
(e.g. Walter A. McDougall’s ...the Heavens and the Earth: a political
history of the space age, Basic Books, 1985); and even the
engineering mindset itself (see Thomas P. Hughes’ American
Genesis: a century of invention and technological enthusiasm, Penguin,
1989).
[pp. 100-102] For a wonderfully written introduction on the

invention of money and its meaning, I recommend Heather
Pringle’s article “The Cradle of Cash: when money arose in the
ancient cities of Mesopotamia, it profoundly and permanently
changed civilization,” in Discover magazine, October, 1998.
[p. 103] The attractive Enlightenment disposition of finding the

equivalents of laws of nature, like gravity, that once understood
and incorporated into our social systems will, of their own accord,
solve our problems and constrain us to be “better” individuals and
societies by acting within that “enlightened self-interest” has never
left us, and is if anything even more sought after today. This
hardly needs to be buttressed for anyone who even occasionally
listens to the pronouncements of our political leaders and panels of
experts. It may have been Thomas Hobbes who, in 1651, first
reached for an overarching “theory of everything,” including
671
human affairs, based upon the material laws of matter in motion in

his Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-
wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill. To undeerstand the revolutionary
power of such an argument, see George B Dyson’s Darwin among
the Machines: the evolution of global intelligence, Perseus Books, 1997,
pp. 1-13.
I think, at this point (if I were of a mind to) I could easily
do commissioned speech writing for the White House, State
Department, Commerce, and several others, not by dint of my
being a great speech writer, but simply that the formulas, especially
from the administrations of Reagan to the present are so familiar.
For example: Q: “Madam Secretary: why is it that the

President is urging Congress to grant fast-track approval of most-
favored nation trading status to China (for example) at the very
time when we have strong evidence, both by our own sources and
by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that human rights
abuses continue unabated, that prison labor is being used to
produce goods for export, and that political prisoners continue to
be arrested, held without due process, and even executed.”
A: “I’m glad you asked that question, and believe me it is
very much on the mind of the President and is a formal part of
our diplomatic initiatives. However, first of all we cannot act
disproportionately in our responses to any sovereign nation. We
continue diplomatic efforts to promote the respect of basic human
rights. At the same time we recognize that China (for example) is a
developing nation with enormous hurdles to overcome in
becoming, fully, part of the community of nations. And it is in this
672
larger mission of integrating China into the global market

economy that, in fact, we find the greatest hope of liberalizing the
social democratic forces within their country. This is by far the
most effective way to encourage, and even to guarantee, the
ultimate respect for human rights and human expression. We are
not, as some of you have suggested, turning our backs on the
abuses of human rights. Rather, as we see it, a pragmatic approach
with real hope of effecting these changes is far better than a
merely ideological policy which would isolate China, and
potentially make things much worse. While I am not making a
direct connection between human rights and commercial concerns,
I need not remind all of you that mainland China is the home of
one-fourth of the world’s population and is on the verge of
perhaps the most extraordinary economic and technological
advancement in the twenty-first century. It would be nothing
more than foolhardy for us to ignore the potential benefits of good
relations between our two countries as we approach the next
century.”
Apparently a recently published book tries to make the case

that, historically, democratic republics do not make war against
each other, in essence also producing a kind of Newtonian “law of
nature” equivalent to the systems approach toward eliminating a
great evil (war). See Michael Mandelbaum’s review of Spencer
Weart’s Never At War: why democracies will not fight one another, Yale
Univ. Press. 1998, in The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 20,
1998, p. 17.
673
[pp. 104-108] The best descriptions I know of the “pastoral ideal”

are
found in Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: technology and the
pastoral ideal in America, Oxford Univ. Press, 1964; and John F.
Kasson’s Civilizing the Machine: technology and republican values in
America, 1776-1900, Penguin, 1984. One finds many of these
foundational ideas among the many contemporary communitarian
movements. See also Robert Bellah, et. al., Habits of the Heart:
individualism and commitment in American life, University of
California Press, 1985; and R. Bellah, et. al., The Good Society,
Vintage, 1992.
[pp. 108-110] On several occasions I have asked my students to

describe their home communities. The descriptions vary greatly, of
course, with some students having a few examples of childhood
groups of best friends but no sense of their parents’ sense of
community. I recall one student’s description of a disaster that
occured on her block as a child. Fire swept through the
neighborhood, taking out a number of houses and sparing others.
What followed was a pattern we often see when the hardship of
natural disaster strikes. Everyone in the neighborhood pitched in
in the aftermath to see to the welfare of their neighbors, among
whom there previously had been no remarkable interaction. Rather
than packing neighbors off to the high school gymnasium to find
shelter, neighbors took each other into their own homes,
apparently for weeks. As the enclave found normalcy again, this
student reported, they formed a really tightly-knit neighborhood.
They became close friends, they held street parties in
674
commemoration of the fire, and when someone moved away it was

not some annonymous disappearance, but considered a very real
loss to the neighborhood. After about ten years had passed,
however, few of the original neighbors who had suffered together
were left, and the new families that moved in never were grafted in
(through whose fault, I don’t know) as replacements in a precious
community, and the once grand association became a mere memory.
These sorts of association by outside imperative are
common, and they frequently produce the sorts of friendships that
somehow seem deeper and more lasting than any others. Combat
veterans often tell similar stories. One of my favorite books for
illuminating the experiences of marginalized Americans at the
turn of the twentieth century is The Life Stories of Undistinguished
Americans, as told by themselves, Hamilton Holt, ed., Routledge, 1990.
The first vignette is “The life story of a Lithuanian,” (Antanas
Kaztauskis), who as a young man emmigrated from his homeland
to Chicago, and worked in the infamous meatpacking industry. He
tells his story very matter-of-factly, and yet the hardscrabble
existence he eeked out is most strenuous, including the intense
loneliness, and the repeated abuses such as the payoffs to police
necessary to get a position in the workline closer to the plant to
ensure a day’s works. Soon, Mr. Kaztauskis is becoming street-
smart, and suspicious of nearly everyone in authority, and for very
good reasons. When he is brought to a union meeting, there is a
natural hostility among different ethnic groups, since they suspect
each other of stealing jobs from the other, and our narrator is
particularly suspicious of the Irish. However, he soon discovers a
genuine trust and cross-ethnic commraderie in his union
675
membership.
“The union is doing another good thing. It is combining all
the natiionalities. The night I joined the Cattle Butcher’s Union I
was led into the room by a negro member. With me were
Bohemians, Germans, and Poles, and Mike Donnelly, the
President , is an Irishman. He spoke to us in English and then
three interpreters told us what he said. We swore to be loyal to
our union above everything else except the country, the city, and
the State--to be faithful to each other--to protect the women
workers--to do our best to understand the history of the labor
movement, and to do all we could to help it on. Since then I have
gone there every two weeks and I help the movement by being an
interpreter for the other Lithuanians who come in. That is why I
have learned to speak and write good English. The others do not
need me long. They soon learn English, too, and when they have
done that they are quickly becoming Americans....So this is why I
joined the labor union. There are many better stories than mine,
for my story is very common. Therer are thousands of
immigrants like me. Over 300,000 immigrants have been
organized in the last three years by the American Federation of
Labor. The immigrants are glad to be organized if the leaders are
as honest as Mike Donelly is. You must get money to live well, and
to get money you must combine. I cannot bargain alone with the
Meat Trust. I tried it and it does not work.” (p.20)
Before I cam across this book I had known of the labor
movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I had
heard of the brutality of the conditions and the inequities of the
workers. But I still didn’t quite grasp the absolute love for the
676
union communities, just how central the unions were in defining

who these workers felt themselves to be, and the near religious
devotion to them that seemed to be part of the cultural landscape
several generations ago, until I read this simple, homely, first-
person story.
Finally, for the little anecdote on page 81 about Wolfgang
Pauli’s dismissal of an idea being “not even wrong,” I am indebted
to Timothy Ferris’ wonderful book The Whole Shebang: a state-of-
the-universe(s) report, Touchstone, 1998, p. 82. As an undergraduate
I had heard the same quote, but I remembered it as being attributed
to another physicist of the same period, Paul A.M. Dirac.
[p. 111-112] There are several important sources that examined

the rapid and complicated transformations in earning livings
between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries in
America. I still feel that the single best synthesis of the broad
sweep of changes is Daniel Boorstin’s classic The Americans: the
democratic experience, Vintage, 1973. Of especial importance here
are: Part IV, “The Urban Quest for Place”; Part V, “Leveling Times
and Places”; Part VI, “Mass Producing the Moment”; amd Part VII,
“The Thinner Life of Things.” For a specific treatment of the rise
of leisure inventions among the working class and the social
stratifications, see Roy Rosenzweig’s Eight Hours for What We Will:
workers and leisure in an industrial city, 1870-1920, Cambridge
University Press, 1983. Also, for the amazing understanding by
certain prominent entrepreneurs of the unfolding cultural forces
and their potentials, see John F. Kasson’s Amusing the Million: Coney
Island at the turn of the century, Hill and Wang, 1978.
677
[pp. 113-115] For the search among the middle class for meaning
there are some exceptional studies. Nothing can compare to the
contemporaneous sociological study of Muncie Indiana by Robert
S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: a study in modern
American culture, first published in 1929 (Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich) which is still reprinted as an unprecedented and
benchmark-setting book in sociological anthropology. It is truly
remarkable how the concerns of average citizens in mid-America
at that time can be seen in today’s society. It would be useless to
attempt a summary, this book simply needs to be read to be
appreciated.
For the rising concern with identity-by-profession (e.g.,
“career”) and the attendant mission of higher education to provide
certificates of that identity, see Burton J. Bledstein’s The Culture of
Professionalism: the middle class and the development of higher
education in America, Norton, 1978; and Laurence R. Vesey’s The
Emergence of the American University, University of Chicago Press,
1965. For the profession of marketing, whose specialty was in
decyphering the uncertainties of American identity and exploit
them, see Roland Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream:
making way for modernity, 1920-1940, University of California
Press, 1986.
For an extension of the fluidity of meaning and identity
into the current period, see Kenneth J. Gergen’s The Saturated Self:
dilemmas of identity in contemporary life, Basic Books, 1991. Two
other books attempt, with varying success, to both account for this
fluidity and to undeerstand the means possible to reconsitute our
678
understanding of ourselves and navigate the landscape, which they

do not see changing its trajectory. See Robert Jay Lifton’s The
Protean Self: human resilience in an age of fragmentation, Basic Books,
1993; and Walter Truett Anderson’s The Future of the Self:
inventing the Postmodern Person, Penguin Putnam, 1997. Of the
two, actually, I feel that Lifton’s is a bit more considered. He is
working from a research background of several decade’s
investigations into cultures in the most profound crises of
existence imaginable (e.g., Holocaust studies, Cambodia in the wake
of Pol Pot). And finally, I think that an intriguing and well-written
companion to the preceding two books is Peter D. Kramer’s
Listening to Prozac: a psychiatrist explores antidepressant drugs and the
remaking of the self, Viking, 1993.
In my example of the automobile as a touchstone to
creating identity, it would be hard to find two examples more
different in this respect during the early years of the automobile
industry than Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan. Ford is one of the
most remarkable figures in the twentieth century, for a variety of
reasons. He was very self-consciously a social engineer, and his
revolutionary $5/day wage and the low cost of his cars were
deliberate attempts to have the very people who worked on his
assembly lines be the sort of population who could own his car.
Sloan’s vision of the automobile as a constantly moving “carrot”
for consumer identity desires wound up being more in touch with
the cultural currents. See, Stuart Leslie’s Boss Kettering: the wizard
of General Motors, Columbia Univ. Press, 1983, especially the
chapter “Keeping the Customer Dissatisfied.” For an analysis of
Ford, see Thomas Hughes’ American Genesis, op. cit., chapter 5,
679
“Taylorismus + Fordismus = Americkanismus.”
[p. 115-117] It is impossible to overestimate the importance of

“car
culture” in absolutely remaking our physical landscapes, and with it
the rythms and patterns that we now consider absolutely normal
and indispensible. This coincided nicely with a much longer
tradition of defining a new middle ground in the American
landscape, the suburbs. For a history of that movement, see
Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: the suburbanization of the
United States, Oxford University Press, 1985. For a prehistory to
Crabgrass Frontier, see Mary P. Ryan’s The Cradle of the Middle
Class: the family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865, Cambridge
University Press, 1981. For a contemporary analysis of what we
are now cemented into, see James Howard Kunstler’s The
Geography of Nowhere: the rise and decline of America’s man-made
landscape, Touchstone, 1993. For a more general study of the
meaning of different kinds of space for the human social psyche,
see Winifred Gallagher’s The Power of Place: how our surroundings
shape our thoughts, emotions, and actions, HarperPerrenial, 1993; and
Tony Hiss’ The Experience of Place: a new way of looking at and
dealing with our radically changing cities and countryside, Vintage,
1990.

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The Persistence of Visions

(Reflections on living from the classroom

Nelson R. “Buzz” Kellogg

all rights reserved

The Persistence of Visions

Introduction Upward not Northward; Out of FlatlandAltogether 9

Part One On Gratitude 19

Chapter 1: Childhood and the Intimations of Gratitude 19

Chapter 2: Why Have We Forgotten Gratitude 33

Chapter 3: Beyond Childhood: cultivating an even deeper gratitude 49

Part Two Understanding Surrogates 68

Chapter 4: The Power of Surrogates 68

section i) Money Changes 68

section iii) And Your Point Is? 77

Chapter 5: A World of Acceleration (or, why jump from a window?) 89

section i) A brief excursion by way of physics 90

section ii) Another brief excursion in accelerating

section iii) Uncle Hilding: my first introduction

to market capitalism 106

section iv) Why do people jump out of windows? 112

Chapter 6: The Great Divergence 133

section i) When skating on thin ice, just skate faster 135

section iii) Can we ever go home again? 155

Part Three Deep Practice, Synthesis, and Envisioning

(Thoughts on conversation, community, education,

and what is worth doing) 159

Chapter 7: When Questions Come of Age 159

section i) A river runs through it (the stages of life) 159

section ii) When are we available for wisdom? 166

section iii) Keeping track of your life

and telling stories 176

section iv) A note on mortality 185

Chapter 8: Holography, Deep Practice, and Synthesis:

Thoughts on education 188

section i) Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom 188

section ii) On holography:

A possible framework for envisioning 194

section iii) The romance of insight and the grand adventure

of being human 206

section iv) Why should we seek wisdom? 220

section v) What ARE we doing?

The evolution of the university

and the atrophy of synthesis 226

section vi) The future of education,

formal and informal 239

section vii) The Conversational Community:

Reading out from the university 261

Chapter Notes 273

Preface — On Reading this Book

me when enough is enough, when bridges need to be presented, and simply

Introduction — Upward Not Northward;

We must always follow somebody looking for truth,

It is so difficult to find the beginning.

This book is about promptings, questions, desires, and resolutions. It is

entertainment for bored college students," by Mark Edmundson, Harper’s

elucidating than an ever–more elaborate set of rules for a meaningless game,

environmental breakdowns, have only found their voices in common discourse of

closely linked to consumerism, had already begun to assert themselves as the

deceiving ourselves, deliberately truncating our available data. If our primal

Spaceland, on a once–in–a–thousand–year mission to find and anoint an apostle

of higher dimensionality before Square is returned to Flatland to evangelize for

Persistence of Visions (reflections on living from the classroom and

Part One — On Gratitude